Standing Out From The Crowd

One thing I have noticed among a lot of people in society these days is that a lot of people tend to hide behind others except for standing out in the crowd. A lot of people will look at something and think "oh wow that would be amazing!" But wouldn't actually want to be the first to do it. Of course they would want to, but a lot of us lack the courage to do so.

One particular experiment, if you ever studied psychology you might know this, conducted by Asch in the 1950's shows just how many people conform. The study involved in average about 8 people, one would be the test subject, the others would be confederates. To the test subject, the other confederates would be known as other test subjects. They were all asked in turn to compare three lines to one single one and say which of the three was the same length as the first. During some of the questions, the confederates would all purposefully lie about which one matched. This would have caused the test subject to consider if they, in fact, were wrong, even though their answer was blatantly right and would repeat what the confederates said as their answers.

Of course there are many ways you could evaluate the test, firstly being how real it was and what could have changed to get rid of any ethical issues but I won't go into all that, firstly because I am very tired tonight and secondly because (sad as I genuinely am to say it) I don't actually study psychology anymore.

So, we as humans have changed a lot over the millions of years and after all this development, a lot of us are still conforming around others, following what we see and what we hear. You should all know that each and every one of you is special, and you deserve to be who you want to be, and you don't have to follow the crowd all the time. Smile and be who you are, because that's the best thing you can do.


*Just a small side note, the part about Asch's study is merely a quick summary of what I learned about it. I don't want to start a debate on how it isn't ethical or anything like that. Had enough of that in sixth form. I used it basically as an example because that I what popped into my head when I thought about conformity.