Cognitive And Social Psychology Conformity: Theories, Positive And Negative Impacts

Social Comparison Theory

Discuss about the Cognitive and Social Psychology Conformity.

Conformity is simply defined as the changing behaviour of ones that must match with the behaviour or responses of other people. Few decades back, the pair Deutsch and Gerard stated the difference between the two: normal and informational conformity. Normative conformity can be defined as the wish to form exact interpretation of real world and the real behaviour (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). The informational conformity is considered to be taken as goals for obtaining approvals in the society from the people of community. In general, conformity can be defined as a feature of formation of human belief that has been criticized. It can also be considered as the influence that has created negative impact over reliability. If a few networks are employed as the source for experiment, study of the conformity can be done as to how it is effective in the changing behaviour of people. Major types of conformity can be in group level and peer and can also be found in an individual. For scaling up of the social networks, a learning method which can construct confluence model is proposed. Model of confluence is always proposed because it helps in formalizing the impacts of social conformity into a good probabilistic model (James, 2008). This report emphasizes on conformity and the theories that are associated with it. The idea of conformity and its analysis is also done.

Under conformity, people always come up with such behaviour which will be obviously loved by others and this can be done by changing their attitudes. Conformity occurs basically in the small groups. Conformity can occur in front of other people or might occur individually as well. Watching TV is the perfect example to draw the actual concept of conformity. People watch TV in front of others as well as individually too. In both the cases, they follow the social norms in every way. Conformity is usually related to young group of people. However, it can occur in any age. Social influence can be considered to be one of the major factor of final explanation. In case if people has a fear of society, they will always conform to others (Bernheim & Exley, 2015).

Social comparison theory involves the habit of self-evaluation and later comparing oneself to the others. This type of behaviour is competitive in nature and social comparison behaves as an important source for this type of theory. This theory expresses that if a person who is driven to drive upward, he improves his performance every time but also reduces the discrepancies in between and the other people’s performance. Competitive behaviour is always caused with a zeal of reaching upwards and to do better than the rest of the world or at least with the people that surrounds us. Competitive behaviour is one of the types of this theory of social comparison. Social comparison theory was stated in the year 1950 by Festinger. Under this theory, he stated that communication plays an important role when a person wants to reach to the agreement. When a person is communicating in a group, uniformity creates a pressure on the conversation (Garcia, Tor, & Schiff, 2013). This happens basically for two reasons either all the members in the group should keep on continuing the conversation with the same opinion or it is necessary for the locomotion and  the individuals also feel that they should agree on the reality as world will validate righteousness of every individual’s opinion.  Festinger also emphasized on the importance of the opinion that is formed by the people or any single person. People always engage themselves in the social comparisons and there is a reason behind doing so. This reaction is basically based on the comparison of motivation. Objective standards are the reliable for these kinds of evaluations. But these objective standards are not easily available because they are hard to achieve every time one tries for it. There are times when people do not look for any feedback from the others yet they want to have an optimistic image to be maintained in the society (Corcoran, 2011). In case if the society feels the need to change these type of people, they need to engage themselves in the comparison more often.

Social Influence Theory

Social influence theory is also known as the umbrella concept as it is combined with the multiple theories to make one. All the theories which are combined in the social influence theory are used in the thoughts structuring and knowledge which is based on the behaviour of the consumer. This theory was found to create the balance between the opinion or the interest of other and oneself. This means that a person can take his decisions according to him or he can also take opinion from others before taking a decision. People often ask opinion of others for a certain motives. Later it was found that there were several reasons for the agreement or the disagreement in the opinions with people (Cascio, Scholz, & Falk, 2015). Several studies has been conducted that shows the changes in the attitudes of the people whenever they come in contact with any other person or a group. Cliché reasons because of which the attitude changes can easily get encouraged by the normative concerns are:

• Ensuring coherence and self-monitoring.
• Satisfactory relations which are ensured should be the result.
• Understanding of the issue in terms of the influence(Guo, Turner, & Tan, 2006).

The theory was researched earlier by many researchers and they believed that normative and informative motives are always linked with the various mechanisms that generate the changes in the attitude. This desire of having normative expectations will result in the informational analysis and the judgement changes which is transitory. The studies have been done recently on the analysis of influence which can be done by submitting proof of the normative motives that impacts the influence just with the common set of mechanisms of information (Wood, 2000). In the end when the participants are motivated for defending their position, they select the arguments that they can read for supporting their view and then finally generates the thoughts which were supportive of position and denoted attitudes that are polarized. Challenges for the investigation in the coming days will always be done for developing the models of these cognitive processes which includes capturing of the attitude change in variety to informational settings with which it occurs.

Conformity is defined as the behaviour to which people adapt when they need to conform to others in order to maintain the social pressure. Conformity can be viewed as positive and negative. Positive conformity will always allow people to be a part of the society or the group who look alike and also speak the same things. This positive side is known as the normative influence. This is only possible when the people in similar groups share the same opinion or conformity and these kinds of people are liked by everyone (Yu & Sun, 2013). Negative influence of conformity happens when a person does not require feedback or any opinion and does things on his own. These type of people are not liked by everyone because they do not confirm to others. Hence, conformity will always be based on the desire to be liked by others and it is also subjective. Social influence conformity occurs when people have the hanker being correct all the time. Minority situations can be helpful to make use of conformity. When in a group or society, any decision is taken unanimously; there is a need for everyone to conform. People with minority decisions have a huge pressure on them and they need to confirm and accept opinion or lifestyle of others (Panagopoulos & Linden, 2016). Tensions which are racial are the same (Zafar, 2009). Unanimous decisions are not always as solid as it is seen. Hence, breakage in conformity is such a nice thing which always proposes changes which are needed and can also be considered as a nice thing to allow conformity. However, positive and negative aspects can be seen same in a way that conformity occurs because people will always want to be a part of the group but other than this relation, positive and negative conformity are not taken as same.

Conformity: Positive and Negative

Social workers always contact those people who are depressed or have lost control on life and have no courage to live their life further. They always seek support to keep themselves up and running. It is a responsibility of a social care worker to help such kind of people and during this journey of helping others, social care worker may feel that they need to conform. Depressed people will always wish to talk about their miseries of life and they seek someone who can listen to them and help them. By conforming to them, a social care worker will be able to help these people (Allott & Robb, 1998). In order to help such people, two things are required: capability to provide the support and ability to identify the requirements. Yet with negative conformity, there can remain a lack of enthusiasm in a social worker for the people who are looking for support. This is taken as positive conformity.

For building a foundation of a social working ground, a social worker should be well informed about the area he needs to work in and should also have all the skills required to help in the growth of NGO . Sometimes, people who are looking to work in an NGO will conform to a social worker as they feel that they are more informed than they are. But this can be a misunderstanding too (Blythe, 2010). Now this can become negative perspective. Hence, informational conformity can work negatively sometimes.

Conclusion

This report emphasizes on the conformity definition and the theories related to it. Normative conformity is proved to be positive and informational conformity is negative sometimes. Both have the similarities too but both of them have different motives behind making people agree in a group. People when want to conform to other people just to feel the part of society is positive but to conform in order to damage one’s own personality and lifestyle is negative (Suhay, 2016). There is a psychology in the minds of the people and it creates pressure on the society. Both Positive and negative conformities are discussed but still it is difficult to analyse whether conformity is entirely good or bad.

References

Allott, M. & Robb, M., 1998. Understanding Health and Social Care: An Introductory Reader. s.l.:SAGE.

Bernheim, D. B. & Exley, C. L., 2015. [Online] Available at: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/16-070_1d8d5b51-93dd-4906-b811-4436813d55db.pdf [Accessed 19 February 2018].

Blythe, C., 2010. [Online] Available at: https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/16186/1/__ddat01_staffhome_bjones_Downloads_46-130-1-PB.pdf [Accessed 19 February 2018].

Cascio, C. N., Scholz, C. & Falk, E. B., 2015. [Online] Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1137&context=neuroethics_pubs [Accessed 19 February 2018].

Cialdini, R. B. & Goldstein, N. J., 2004. psych.ubc. [Online] Available at: https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc591Readings/CialdiniGoldstein2004.pdf [Accessed 12 February 2018].

Corcoran, K., 2011. soco.uni-koeln. [Online] Available at: https://soco.uni-koeln.de/docs/Corcoran_Crusius_Mussweiler_2011_Social_Comparison.pdf [Accessed 13 February 2018].

Garcia, S. M., Tor, A. & Schiff, T. M., 2013. The Psychology of Competition:. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 20(10), pp. 1 -17.

Guo, Z., Turner, T. & Tan, F., 2006. The Effect of Normative Social Influence and Cultural Diversity on Group. [Online] Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6bf6/fa63a7f2af8d97433b67b3b500a9c99cf56d.pdf [Accessed 21 March 2018].

James, K., 2008. kevinzollman. [Online] Available at: https://www.kevinzollman.com/uploads/5/0/3/6/50361245/zollman_-_social_structure_and_the_effects_of_conformity.pdf [Accessed 12 February 2018].

Panagopoulos, C. & Linden, S. v. d., 2016. Conformity to implicit social pressure: the role of political. Social Influence, 11(3), pp. 177-184.

Suhay, E., 2016. [Online] Available at: https://www.democracy.uci.edu/newsevents/events/conference_files/suhay_2016_politicalconformity.pdf [Accessed 19 February 2018].

Wood, W., 2000. [Online] Available at: https://www3.psych.purdue.edu/~willia55/392F-'06/Wood-Influence.pdf[Accessed 19 February 2018].

Yu, R. & Sun, S., 2013. suitable rewards to motivate the different generations. [Online] Available at: suitable rewards to motivate the different generations/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0064530 [Accessed 19 February 2018].

Zafar, B., 2009. newyorkfed.org. [Online] Available at: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr365.pdf [Accessed 19 February 2018].