When is conformity good and bad

We create penalties for those who do not follow those rules to ensure harmony can occur. This process happens in every society. Even friendships set rules that have consequences if someone breaks them. We place pressure on one another because it helps us to succeed, while we also get an opportunity to help everyone else find success too. Conformity offers protection against outside threats. When someone conforms to society, they receive protection from other outside threats that could impact their lives and negative ways.

We know for a fact that there is strength in numbers. Our ancestors had to form societies to protect themselves against wild animals and other tribes. Today, we do the same thing by developing nations, communities, and neighborhoods to ensure our mutual survival. When each member stays strong and conforms set the expectations of everyone else, there was a natural wall of protection that forms. Conformity creates a safety net. There will always be people who choose not to conform to society.

Those that do choose to take this action help those who decide not to follow the rules because they continue to live within a realm of social acceptability. This activity creates a safe place for everyone to live. There are numerous ways that these structures are implemented, with many of them administered through social programs that are overseen by the government.

We often agree that our personal definition of success is due to the ability we have as a group to care for everyone when they are in need. Conformity makes the work easier for everyone. The goal of conforming to society is one that seeks eternal harmony. People who choose to take this path want to see their society continue to benefit others in positive ways.

One of the outcomes of this process is to distribute work fairly throughout the group. Everyone pays their fair share in productivity, taxation, and even volunteerism.

The group sees that there is a greater good which can be achieved when everyone works together to accomplish a goal. Conformity often hampers personal progress. If you surround yourself with positive influences, then your desire for conformity will create beneficial outcomes for you. The opposite occurs if you surround yourself with negative peers. Bad influences can ruin your chances at success in a variety of ways. Students might find that conformity, for example, leads them to smoke or use drugs against their will because they want to be excepted by their peer group.

That can lead to health issues and poor grades. Conformity increases the chances of depression. The fear of social rejection is something that most people face at least once in their lives. It creates a feeling that compels you to blindly follow the people that you want to have like you.

If you succumb to this pressure, then the emotional reaction in either direction increases the chances of depression forming over time. Conformity causes you to lose your identity. But conformity also carries with it the power to make human beings ignore their own consciences, sometimes to the point of committing atrocities.

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. The power of conformity and cascades has deep implications for political polarization.

In homogeneous groups, people tend to deal with a limited pool of information. With your limited information, you are more likely to move in the direction of opposing abortion rights rather than supporting them.

Cognitive biases are flaws in your thinking that can lead you to draw inaccurate conclusions They can be harmful because they cause you to focus too much on some kinds of information while overlooking other kind. As we saw so far, cognitive biases can be problematic, because they can distort our thinking and cause us to form bad judgments and make bad decisions For example, the ostrich effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to avoid information that they perceive as potentially unpleasant.

Unconscious bias — also known as cognitive bias — refers to how our mind can take shortcuts when processing information While these shortcuts may save time, an unconscious bias is a systematic thinking error that can cloud our judgment, and as a result, impact our decision. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Philosophy Is conformity good or bad? Ben Davis September 4, Is conformity good or bad? Why is conformity so important? Why is conformity dangerous? What is conformity in simple words? How does conformity affect behavior? What can conformity lead to?