Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Inquiry Blog Post II
I plan to conduct research on social conformity. Humans seem to have the need to fit in, and some will go to incredible lengths to do so. I do not have a lot of formal knowledge on the subject, as my research has been focused on physical sciences, but I do have a great interest for social science, and conformity has always been interesting to me, since I've seen people change with the times throughout primary, middle, and secondary school. I actually lost my best friend in middle school to conformity, so I have a personal stake in the inquiry. My friend had been the same ever since I had known him, but the possibility of popularity caused him to change his clothes, his taste in music, and eventually his personality entirely, and I had too much pride to let that happen to me. I hope to compile some reasoning behind conformity and I hope to gather some good examples of it, as some I have seen have been rather humorous.
It is astonishing how the man in this video goes against all logic, just because he's afraid of standing out. He plays it safe by turning around like a boob. This is the best display of conformity I have seen, thus far.
This is another great example of conformity: Apple Inc. I don't know how they've done it, but Apple has made people think they NEED their products. People flock to Apple stores to get redundant products the day they come out for ridiculous prices. For example: You can get an iPhone 4 now for $0.99, or you can get the new iPhone 5 for $200. They are the same product, less the extra 0.5" of screen, and yet people still come in droves for this.
This is a dramatization of a real scientific study conducted by Solomon Asch in 1951. The results were impressive. Only 25% of participants failed to conform. The rest let social pressure override logic-- evidence of a belonging complex humans seems to have.
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This idea of conformity is a great idea. Many studies have ben done over the years however it still seems a bit of a mystery to us. The name of the particular study escapes me however I think it was recently done by Curiosity on Discovery. The experiment was to see how long someone would fallow directions from a authoritative sores. The experiment was done originally in the 1970's to see how many Americans where capable of doing what the Nazi’s did in WW2. The astounding results from both experiments showed that over 70% of Americans where capable of doing something terrible to a complete stranger for no reason at all when presented by an authoritative source.
ReplyDeleteI find this topic very unique. Actually me ex boyfriend and I used to have this discussion all the time. Conformity to me in modern society is imperative to an extent. Without some sort of social norms, we would have chaos. As far as the iPhone goes, I agree and disagree. This invention is very user friendly. I had a droid for a long time because I didn't want to conform to the social norm of the iPhone. I wanted something different. But when I started downloading apps, my entire droid shut down. I later came to fid out that Droids don't possess the capacity to hold anything downloadable. So the makers place the applications on there, so that you think you can download these apps when the phone as a whole simply doesn't have the technological capacity. Also the Droid expiration date only last a year, however the service provider usually makes them have the phone for two. I spent countless hours in the Verizon store trying to figure out why my phone was yet again not working when I had not damaged it in any possible way. Of course the service provider came up with the excuse, oh well this was a defect phone, when in reality it was just a horrible programmed device. Needless to say, I switched to the iPhone 4. I have had no problems since getting this phone. I agree when it comes to the iPhone 4 versus the iPhone 5 however, sometime conformity isn't about fitting in, it's about everyone finding a new device that user friendly. So maybe you can use that as a counter argument in your paper.
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