In our daily life, whenever we have to make decision, we may always have many concerns and may hardly make a choice. Different people will have different concerning point even though they are deciding the same thing. For example, when 2 girls go shopping and both of them want to buy the same dress, one of them may concern about whether the dress worth the price while the other girl may think that whether she should buy that piece of dress as she already owns many dresses. However, when they cannot make a choice, whey will always follow others action. That is why when one of the girls decides to buy the dress, the other one will most likely follow and buy the dress also. These can be explained by the psychological theory of conformity.
From chapter 10, we have learnt that conformity is a kind of social influence. As people would like to adhere to social norms, which is the rules, laws or cultural conventions that regulate our life, they will most likely change their altitudes without a direct request from others. There has been some survey that was held by different psychologists to study about the features of conformity. One of the famous studies is the test carried out by Solomon Asch. In the study, Asch has asked the participants to match line lengths. When an unanimous group of people choose the wrong answer, the majority of the participants cannot remain independent and they will follow the group to choose the wrong answer even though most of their original choice is correct. These can clearly explain the concept of conformity.
Conformity can bring us advantages. For example, when the government intended to introduced the Moral and National Education (MNE) to be one of the compulsory subjects last year, which is believed that the government wants to use this policy to ‘brainwash’ Hong Kong students. At first, only a small amount of people took actions to ask the government to cancel that