Why conforming is bad

It is most likely group norms which have formed the laws we abide by today in fact. Back to thousands of years again where the cavemen congregated in their groups, they would have had group norms similar to some of the laws we have today such as not to kill someone else and not to steal. Therefore, conformity may have contributed to the law and order we have in the world today.

Conformity can come in useful when we are in unfamiliar surroundings or activities. I'm sure you can think of an example when you have taken part in an activity such as dancing and you didn't know what kind of dancing to do, so what did you do? You mimicked the people around you and danced like them to avoid embarrassment.

Everyone has done it in some way or another throughout their life but it really is handy in the right situations. These are some good arguments in favour of conformity, but it can be a double-edged sword, just look how it can be used in comedy from the video below:. As seen from the video above, Conformity is used for comedy, surely not needed for survival right? Maybe not, in modern times many people tend to conform to fads for a time, then they completely forget about it and move onto another fad.

This is seen on the internet constantly. It'll be interesting to see how many people remember the Harlem Shake craze when someone stumbles across this article in a year or so. Fads like this tend to be really popular simply because they're popular which seems paradoxical.

The easy way to put this is that because 1 person likes something, another person starts liking it and so on and so forth. This is obvious, but this isn't the point I'm trying to make. The point is that many people tend to start "liking" these things not because they genuinely LIKE the fad, but because of the illusion of everybody liking the fad, thus it builds up rapidly.

This is often seen in music also. Nowadays music has a lot more to do with image than the actual songs. Therefore, much music today seems more manufactured with shallow lyrics and soft-core pornography for music videos. This is because the media are making less independent people conform to what the Media decides is "Cool" and thus the norm. This is an example of conformity dumbing down an art form.

I wrote another article titled "What is Wrong With Much of Today's Music" which goes into more detail, you can find it by visiting my Hubpages profile. I think it goes without saying that most of the Germans in the S. However, this is conformity which has been used to cause the most horrific genocide the planet has ever seen!

So the more a consumer understands the basis of their financial decision-making, the more they can adjust their lifestyle choices toward a more healthy financial future.

While poor people actually make sensible decisions when buying groceries, for example, other research has found that, during periods when money is scarce, people perform worse on measures of fluid intelligence the ability to think abstractly, identify patterns, and solve problems and cognitive control.

Poverty mentality is a mindset that people develop over time based on a strong belief that they will never have enough money. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Physics What are the pros and cons of conformity? Ben Davis February 1, What are the pros and cons of conformity?

Why you should not conform to society? Why do humans conform to society? Why do we not conform? What are the 3 types of conformity? When can conformity be a good thing? Milgram found that all of the participants were willing to shock the confederate at volts, and two-thirds continued to administer shocks at the very highest level of voltage. The participants were simply willing to trust the instructor that what they were doing was okay.

In order to understand how conformity works—from fairly banal examples such as public smoking bans all the way up to atrocities committed during World War II—Sunstein breaks it down into its component parts:. Signals from in-groups—people you like, trust, or admire—are far more valuable than information signals from out-groups.

Reputational signals: We may have private qualms about a point of view or given course of action, but because we want to remain in the good graces of our social grouping, we suppress our dissent and eventually fall in line. To demonstrate how a cascade can work, he cites a study by sociologist Duncan Watts, in which study participants were asked to rank a group of seventy-two songs from best to worst.

A control group was not given any information other than the songs themselves. But eight other subgroups could see how many people had previously downloaded the songs within their subgroup. Watts found that the songs the control group had labeled as the worst songs generally ended up toward the bottom, while the ones the control group favored generally ended up toward the top.

But for most of the other songs, a burst of popularity based on early downloads predicted how well they did in the rankings. In other words, people gave higher rankings to songs they perceived as popular among their group.

Results like these may explain why companies marketing certain products often try to grease the wheels of sales by creating an impression of popularity before the product is actually popular.

Just find one thing you want your employees or customers to do, present it as a descriptive norm for positive purposes only! Now you're one step closer to using psychology in your everyday life and making great things out of it! Conformity - a change in an individual's beliefs or behavior in response to an overt or covert pressure of others. Obedience - accepting the demands of someone whose status or social power is higher than ours.

Compliance - responding to a person's requests, regardless of their social status. Normative Conformity - the need to belong and follow the norms of a specific group. The "normal" ones are more "part of the group", and people love people who act like them. Informational Conformity - the need to be right and make decisions based on the "just" majority like rating a movie 5 stars even though you didn't really love it, but most people did. What Causes Conformity? Persuasive argument - We are exposed to new arguments that we haven't thought of, and the very exposure creates extremism of opinions.