Conformity and Obedience

All of us are adjusting our actions and thoughts in order to coincide with other people and that is called conformity. This phenomenon can be seen in everyday life situations. For example, during my first writing class in the gymnasium my teacher told us to evaluate one person’s essay. As she ended reading we where asked to expressed our opinions. The first one with no doubt said “10”, then the second one and so on. I was not quite sure about that but did not want to disagree with all intelligent classmates so claimed the same. After all, the teacher said that the person who wrote this essay did not pass an exam. As we can se from this example, conformity increases to its highest level when a person (in this example, me), who is observed by other members of the unanimous group (which consists of more than three people), feels insecure and incompetent about his beliefs, while at the same time he sees the group admirable and attractive. The conformity is also strengthened when a person has not committed any responses yet and is used to respect social standards. So these are the main facts about conformity and how it is related to group pressure.

What is more, if we want to know why conformity is so important for people, we should look to the reasons for conformity. The first one is named the normative social influence. It means that a person wants to gain an approval of the group or at least to avoid disapproval. We can notice this phenomenon when we ask a person why he started smoking. Many say that it was because all his friends, or people that he wanted to be friends with, were smoking and he did not want to be somewhat worse, or to be unaccepted to the group. Furthermore, another reason for conformity is informational social influence, which says that a person is determined to accept others valuable thoughts about reality. It is very common among students, who conform only because they want to get some valuable information, which lets them get better grades. Our values and our cultural values are the factors that influence how we interpret the information that those groups provide and how we view social influence as good or bad.

Social psychologists also say that people accept others’ suggestibility and orders very often and that could be named obedience. This behavior reaches its peak when the commanding authority figure (supported by well known institution or known as a very intelligent person) is close at hand. Obedience is strengthened even more when a person who has to obey has not seen anyone who disobeyed this authority’s commands. This can be seen when an employer tells his employee to do something ridiculous or unbelievable and that person cannot say anything against, he has to obey. First of all, he does obey, because a person who commands is standing just in front of him, he is known to be a good boss, so he is an authority to him. What is more, that employee likes order and does not tolerate anyone’s disobedience. So it is quite natural that a person is forced to obey. So from this example we can see when such behavior reaches its peak.

To conclude I can say that social psychologist study how we think and how we relate to other people. They investigate the reasons for conformity and obedience and the main one seems to be the need to be accepted by the group, even though it sometimes means being conformed to falsehood and acting against your own standards.