Reducing conformity in society?

Faith

I have to write an essay for psych and one of the questions is "In what ways may conformity be reduced?". Now I'm pretty stumped! Does anyone have any ideas?

Eoghan-psych

Faith wrote:

I have to write an essay for psych and one of the questions is "In what ways may conformity be reduced?". Now I'm pretty stumped! Does anyone have any ideas?

That seems like an odd way to put it, normally the question would be the other way round.

The first thing that comes to mind would be undermining outgroup biases - "EU citizens" compared to "non national economic migrants". In a nutshell, breaking down the "us and them".

By undermining outgroup biases, the group loses the 'common threat' which can help to reduce variation, increase adherence to some 'norm' and generally suppress individuality of thought or expression.

snorlax

may be a good idea to look up prejudice if you have a good social psychology book as they have a lot of the stuff mentioned above by Eoghan-psych, and possibly if you have access to any online journals you may find some good stuff (the more specifc your search the better the results).

Myksyk

Sounds like they will be looking for you to base it somewhat in actual research done on conformity (what variables increase its liklihood). I would include sections on what social psychology tells us about group behaviour, the importance of critical thinking/scepticism, the input of religious/political group behaviour, the impact of language, the central role of education (getting people to act on mass often depends on their not understanding what they've been told or accepting it uncritically), stereotyping etc. It may also be interesting to throw in a section on the possible advantages and disadvantages of conformity in society (the very concept suggests a certain level of consensus and working together).

snorlax

actually the stanford prison experiment might be good to check out. maybe a paragraph or two to indicate why the guards we're so inhumane to the prisoners. there was a thread on this a little while ago so maybe you could run a search for it on this forum.

Faith

Cheers for all your help! I've only got 300 words left so I'm doing pretty well. I've mentioned Asch and Milgram, but I wasn't sure about including the stanford prision experiment. I'll have a look through a couple of books and see if it's worth including!

muesli_offire

At least peruse Freud's 1921 work 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego', if for no other reason than to be able to say you have.