Professor Correa
English 101
October 2, 2012
Compare and Contrast
If someone asked you to jump off a bridge with two of your friends, would you do it? Peer pressure is defined by social pressure from members of one's peer group to take a certain action, adopt certain values, or otherwise conform in order to be accepted. There are many types of peer pressure; a common one is group pressure.
Drunk driving is defined as operating a motor vehicle after consuming alcohol. This is often caused by stupidity or even peer pressure. Your peers influence you a lot in a negative or positive way. In these two short stories by Rodney Stark and Theresa Conroy the characters fall under peer pressure, which leads to both a negative and positive outcome. Although these two stories are complete opposite from each other, through further analysis one can gather that you should be yourself and not follow in ones footsteps, be a leader.
Group pressure affects everyone involved in the situation. Whether it’s harming or helping others, your still being affected. In the short story Group Pressure by Rodney Stark an experiment was tested on a group of people to show visual perception done by Solomon Asch. In this experiment, Asch gathers two large decks of cards with different lengths of lines on them. One card will display the correct line while the other cards won’t have the correct length line. As being shown the crowd has to decide which card they think is the closet length to the actual card, the crowd will then shout out their answers. As this experiment was proceeding you pretend you’re one of the subjects. Everyone in front of you is picking the same answer as you, your confidence is boosted. You now feel like you know every answer and there’s no doubt in your mind that you can possibly get one wrong. As the experiment gets harder the other subjects are calling out different answers, answers different then yours. But your 100 percent that your right, this is