Inquiry Rough Draft

Teacher's Comments (Link)
“He who marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice”. Humans are complex organisms, most notably for our abilities of critical thought and use of dynamic language. In the midst of human complexities lies a need to belong. Since we have come into existence, humans have clung to each other, finding strength in numbers against the environment. Over time, humans have applied this strategy to social situations, resulting in conformity. We change our behavior in order to cohere to certain groups, listening to certain music, wearing certain clothes, and professing various ideologies. There are divergent theories that aim to answer why humans conform socially. Some trace the behavior to our need of cooperation for survival, while some claim that we have an emotional or egotistical need to belong to a group. Nonetheless, conformity is abundant, and it affects every one of us. Chances are, every human on Earth conforms in some way, shape, or form, at least on the most miniscule of levels. The only testable and observable aspect of conformity is the outward change in behavior; a person may argue for republicans in front of his conservative grandmother, while claiming agreement with democrats in front of his friends; in his subconscious, does that person agree with republican or democrat ideology? What cannot be observed are the internal beliefs of individuals who conform. There is no empirical way to determine whether people change at the core in order to blend in or if people simply change their actions to be acceptable. Although it cannot be proven with current technology, it is more reasonable to assume that people cannot be changed all the way through by social pressure, and that humans simply modify their behavior to avoid the hammers of society.

            In social psychology, conformity is defined as “behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards”, and can my put simply as “yielding to group pressure”. There are three types of conformity currently accepted in social psychology, and they are compliance, internalization, and identification. Compliance is changing one’s actions to satisfy social norms, while disagreeing consciously. Internalization is the idea that a person can change behavior and change internal beliefs in the process. Identification is adhering to the accepted attributes of a social role; having the role of power has been shown to make people belittle the people around them. Man later described conformity in three categories: normative conformity, informational conformity, and ingratiational conformity. Normative conformity is when a person changes his actions in order to fit into a group. The change is fueled by a fear of rejection, and is comparable to compliance, in which the person affected harbors discord in his subconscious. Informational conformity occurs when a person uses the general opinion of a group to make a decision he is uncertain about, using the group’s ideology as a compass. Informational conformity can be said to lead to internalization, because the person in question takes the group’s opinion and makes it his own. Ingratiational conformity is when an individual alters his actions in order to get ahead by means of social networking or favors. This is fueled by the need for something, rather than the need to actually belong to the group. It can be said, then, that ingratiational conformity is also a form of compliance, since people who succumb to it do not falter in their beliefs.

Inquiry Final Draft

“He who marches joyfully to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice” – Albert Einstein (Calaprice) . Humans are complex organisms, most notably for our abilities of critical thought and use of dynamic language. In the midst of human complexities lies a need to belong. Since we have come into existence, humans have clung to each other, finding strength in numbers against the environment. Over time, humans have applied this strategy to social situations, resulting in conformity. We change our behavior in order to cohere to certain groups, listening to certain music, wearing certain clothes, and professing various ideologies. There are divergent theories that aim to answer why humans conform socially. Some trace the behavior to our need of cooperation for survival, while some claim that we have an emotional or egotistical need to belong to a group. Nonetheless, conformity is abundant, and it affects every one of us. Chances are, every human on Earth conforms in some way, shape, or form, at least on the most miniscule of levels. The only testable and observable aspect of conformity is the outward change in behavior; a person may argue for republicans in front of his conservative grandmother, while claiming agreement with democrats in front of his friends; in his subconscious, does that person agree with republican or democrat ideology? What cannot be observed are the internal beliefs of individuals who conform. There is no empirical way to determine whether people change at the core in order to blend in or if people simply change their actions to be acceptable. Although it cannot be proven with current technology, it is more reasonable to assume that people cannot be changed all the way through by social pressure, and that humans simply modify their behavior to avoid the hammers of society.

            In social psychology, conformity is defined as “changing behavior in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards”, and can my put simply as “yielding to group pressure” (McLeod, “What is Conformity?”). There are three types of conformity currently accepted in social psychology, and they are compliance, internalization, and identification. Compliance is changing one’s actions to satisfy social norms, while disagreeing consciously. Internalization is the idea that a person can change behavior and change internal beliefs in the process. Identification is adhering to the accepted attributes of a social role; having the role of power has been shown to make people belittle the people around them (Kelman, 51). Mann later described conformity in three categories: normative conformity, informational conformity, and ingratiational conformity. Normative conformity is when a person changes his actions in order to fit into a group. The change is fueled by a fear of rejection, and is comparable to compliance, in which the person affected harbors discord in his subconscious. Informational conformity occurs when a person uses the general opinion of a group to make a decision he is uncertain about, using the group’s ideology as a compass. Informational conformity can be said to lead to internalization, because the person in question takes the group’s opinion and makes it his own. Ingratiational conformity is when an individual alters his actions in order to get ahead by means of social networking or favors (Mann, “Social Psychology”). This is fueled by the need for something, rather than the need to actually belong to the group. It can be said, then, that ingratiational conformity is also a form of compliance, since people who succumb to it do not falter in their beliefs.

            If internal change is impossible, then the ideas of internalization and informational conformity must contain fallacies. As Mann defined it, informational conformity is when an individual looks to the opinion of a group in order to make decisions he is uncertain about. The problem with this is that in informational conformity, the person in question has no opinion beforehand because he is uncertain; there is nothing to be changed. If there is nothing to be changed, then the behavior cannot be deemed conformity because conformity, by definition, is the change in behavior or belief to fit in with a group. An experiment was conducted in 1935 that demonstrated what social psychologists would call internalization or informational conformity. In the experiment, a point of light was shown onto a dark wall. To a human, the point of light will appear to move, due to an optical illusion. Test subjects were brought into the room individually and asked how far the light appeared to move, and the estimates varied greatly. The subjects were then tested in groups of three. Researchers manipulated the groups, placing people in groups such that two people from each group had similar previous estimates, and one person had a very different previous estimate. When asked aloud how far the light moved, two group members gave estimates similar to their previous estimates, but the other subject, whose original estimate was different, changed his estimate to be closer to the other two. This process was repeated with similar results (Sherif). The conclusion was that people tend to conform in ambiguous situations. In this example, the subjects are unsure of how far the light traveled because the light did not actually travel around the board. Since the visual evidence of movement was unclear, the next source of evidence was the input of the other subject. Since the subjects held no firm belief in the extent of the movement, there was nothing internal to be changed. This sort of behavior could be seen as a parallel to cheating on a test. The person cheating doesn’t know the answer to a question, and so he copies the answer of another. Copying the answer does not signify belief in that answer; it simply demonstrates the need for an answer. The subjects in the experiment simply cheated off one another, without internalizing any belief. If this is true, then conformity is restricted to only compliance and identification, which are defined as merely demonstrating external change. This would rule out the possibility of internal conformity.

            While internal conformity has been accepted for over 60 years, it seems to have been conceived with a skewed definition of conformity. People modify their behavior to fit into groups, that is certain, but the notion that people change at the core due to peer pressure seems unreasonable. From what has been discussed, people can acquire knowledge from one another, but this is not the same as internal conformity, because there is no previous behavior to be modified. It seems more logical to believe that people are aware of their divergent beliefs when they conform, and that change is only on the outside.

           

Literature Cited

Einstein, Albert, and Alice Calaprice. The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.

McLeod, Saul. "What is Conformity?." Simply Psychology. N.p., 2007. Web. 2 Dec. 2012. <http://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html>.

Kelman, Herbert C. "Compliance, identification, and internalization: Three processes of attitude change." The Journal of Conflict Resolution 2.1 (1958): 51-60.

Mann, L. Social Psychology. New York: Wiley. (1969)

Sherif, Muzafer. "A study of some social factors in perception." Archives of Psychology (Columbia University); Archives of Psychology (Columbia University) (1935).

Small Stakes Revision

Writing What Moves You

The piece that I chose that moved me was a speech given by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. His speech was actually an answer to the question “in your years as an astrophysicist, what is the most astounding fact that you have come to know”. Since this was on the spot and vocal, not much attention can be paid to rhetorical devices, because nothing was planned, but without planning, Dr. Tyson was still able to move me in a way only music has matched.

            For the first half of the speech, Dr. Tyson gave the audience a brief history of the origin of life, as defined by the big bang and primordial soup theories. What I really liked about his introduction was the polymerization of story-telling and scientific knowledge that he put into describing the birth of the universe as we know it. Tyson said “the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures”. The doctor was simply describing nuclear fusion, but he was able to do so with vivid imagery. He said that “crucibles cooked light elements into heavy elements”. As an upcoming scientist, I could just picture a large bowl (which is a crucible, in chemistry) in which the nuclei of atoms were being fused together. Even though this is not what happened in the slightest, Tyson gave a clear picture of a process that scientists believe produced everything we know. To someone who is not science-oriented, a crucible would assume its primary annotation of a test or trial, and the person would still be able to picture the elements being cooked. Later on, Tyson said that the stars “went unstable in their later years” and that they “collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy”. In this sentence, the speaker created great imagery with the words “collapsed”, “exploded”, and “scattering”. While the imagery was vivid, the word that came to my attention in that assertion was “guts”. This man, world-renowned for astrophysics, still considered himself human enough to use as elementary a word as “guts”. This diction epitomized the idea we have been discussing in English: speaking sincerely. With as much fame as Dr. Tyson has, he has still stayed humble enough to use a normal vocabulary to describe an extremely complex process. A place where the speaker used some rhetoric was toward the middle, when he said “we are part of this universe; we are in the universe”. By utilizing parallelism, Tyson was able to reinforce the face that we (humans) are in this vast universe. This reinforcement paid off when the speaker said “the universe is in us”. This created a deep feeling, because I had never thought about myself in relation to the universe in this way. Dr. Tyson has demonstrated the type of wonder I want to have for the universe throughout my entire childhood, and through this speech, he has allowed me to appreciate the universe that much more, as well as my own life, because he made me realize that my atoms also came from stars.

Not to sound pretentious, but I did not make many changes to this essay. The only things I struggled with in this piece were not going off on scientific tangents and maintaining an air that the theories of science are not the way, the truth, and the life. I changed a few minor words here and there to clear the wording up, but overall, I am proud of this finished product. A major theme to this class was making writing our own, and I feel like I did that in this work. I was able to nerd out on the word “crucible” while still making a serious assertion. A goal of mine was to write more personally, and I feel like this piece is the first step I took in the class toward being sincere in my writing. At the end, I compared Dr. Tyson’s wonder of the universe to my own, and I feel like a reader would see a little bit of my personality in this work

Writer's Profile

        This class has been my journey from a robot who writes papers to a human being that produces works of writing that are personal and sincere, while still satisfying their purposes. You told us at the beginning of the semester that one of your goals was to help us individualize ourselves and find our unique styles as writers, and I feel as though the class has been successful in doing that. The articles we read help a lot, because they offered many different views on how writing should be carried out. You didn’t simply hammer an ideology into our minds; you let us read the articles and decide for ourselves, which I consider to be very important in my growth as a writer. Anne Lammot’s “Shitty First Drafts” was the most influential article, in my experience. Utilizing her strategies has made writing easier and more enjoyable. The “This I Believe” assignment was the most helpful assignment in developing a personal style. In that essay, I was able to bleed out completely onto the screen, and it was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had while writing. The only thing that hindered my journey was the research project at the end. Even though it couldn’t be as personal, it was a good exercise of trying to add uniqueness to something as dull-sounding as a research project. My writing process has changed dramatically over time. Coming out of high school, my goal was to create the longest essay with the longest words and the most rigid structure. Now, my goal is to create writing that is my own but still serves its purpose and is appropriate for the target audience. I follow Anne Lammot’s philosophy that banging out a subpar first draft in haste is the best way to get a work done. Before, I would spend minutes on each sentence, trying to find better words and analyzing syntax and diction. Now, I write the first draft quickly and improve the writing until I am confident enough to call it a work of writing. At the beginning of the semester, my goals were to become a more personal writing and to be more creative in my writing. To achieve these goals, I tried to write papers without the use of a thesaurus, and I strived to add figurative language to my writing. I feel as though I have made large steps in becoming a personal and creative writer, although I do not believe my journey is over. In the future, I would honestly like to become a master of figurative language, because the use of metaphors has always intrigued me. Becoming talented with metaphors would help me in prose writing and in lyricism, which is a major outlet of mine. The only major challenge I had during the course was to break away from the bondage that was secondary education. I had been taught the same way of writing for many years, and I had written countless essays. I finally had a firm grasp on writing in high school, and I was able to make A’s on essays easily. It was stressful to be told that rigid structure and impersonal writing was not the way. You told us to make the writing our own, and I was scared. My strategy for overcoming this challenge was to try and write as if I was having a conversation. This seemed to work, as I do not remember getting reprimanded for my writing. The class has made me look a writing from a whole new perspective.  You taught us that writing can be much more beautiful than a five paragraph essay. Because my definition of “good writing” has changed from good structure and vocabulary to sincerity and purpose, I have been able to find beauty in almost any piece of writing. The peer reviews seemed to help me the most in my writing process, because they gave me a sense of what my writing was accomplishing. My peers were able to tell me if they were impacted by my writing or not, and that helped my process along quite a lot. At the beginning of the semester, the only thing I expected from the class was to come out a better writer. I didn’t know what a “better writer” meant at the time, but I hoped that I would improve as a result of the class. In my introductory reflective essay, I wrote that I wanted to become able to write fluidly, so that I could get through timed writing and long papers. I feel like my fluidity has increased significantly, because now I have a problem stopping when I’m writing when before I had trouble getting the first sentence out. The assignments the contributed the most to my writing style were the personal credo and the “This I Believe” essay. Like I said, I was able to put all of my thoughts and emotions onto the screen, and that helped me discover a lot of things about myself as a writer and as a person. I’ve always felt that my stories could have positive impact, and these to assignment showed me that I could actually make a difference with my writing. This realization gave me a new found confidence in my abilities to write. In all, I do not think I have turned a new leaf in writing, because I still try too hard on assignments due to self-consciousness, but I do feel as though I have made significant progress in my journey as a writer.