Essay on Human Behaviour and Social Norms

Running head HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND SOCIAL NORMS Do favorable norms go human doings? Human behaviour is the rejoinder to given stimuli, which be soci eithery and environmentally requireed. This response is something that skunk easily be solved and shaped through m some(prenominal) individualized, patchal, friendly, biological, mental f shamor outs. In this essay the occurrence of social norms influencing human behaviour pull up stakes be analyzed using previous studies. sociable norms are part of a larger influential scale generally named as social influence.Social influence is the dress of power that an individual or a group can use on other(a) individuals or monastic read in govern to alter their attitudes, behaviours and lead them to a desired direction. Social influence has as an outcome three different behavioural patterns, which are conformity, compliance and obedience. All of them will be discussed, unless especially conformity and compliance, which mainly inc lude the influence of social norms on behaviour (Franzoi, 2009 Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004).Firstly, conformity in general is the action to adapt with the behaviour of the rest of the people due to perceived group pressure. Practically, this centre that the direction people dress, entertain themselves, protest, work, eat, go on vacations, disclose themselves and substantially anything an individual can withdraw himself, is formed by groups direction and tendencies because the majority of people, if not all of them, try to socialize and be accepted by their society in any possible way.This phenomenon is called conformity and it is an ambiguous apparent movement if independence, which indeed is a reality, exists anyway. This happens because people voluntarily direct their independence towards societys preferences and tendencies in order to feel that they belong somewhere and they have a feature social identity (Franzoi, 2009). The second factor of influence is the compliance and i t is has to do with the public and clear acceptance of ones soul to act according to given social direction by the indicated social power. However, compliance can be shared into internal and outdoor(a).This fashion that a individual can keep up with a situation either because psyche else indirectly forces him or either because he be guileves he should act like this. For exemplification, if someone asks his friend to lie in order not to have problems with parents (e. g. cover a sneaking out) but he does it in the name of friendship even if he does not really want it, this is a clear example of outdoor(a) force making you to comply. Internal compliance is the opposite state where own(prenominal) principles and attitudes force you to do something without having any external pressure to do something.This issue is very important because in the case of external compliance, social norms are in a great influential position in contrast to internal compliance where personal belief s mainly take place on the decisional process (Franzoi, 2009). On the other buy the farm obedience is the total performance of a given order by social power without any resistance against it or trial to sustain independence. Social power is the available social sources through social acceptance and social status that a person or a group of people can have in order to exercise persuasion and give motivating to make people careen or fulfill their requests.Consequently, these three parts of social influence represents the levels of personal accordance to social patterns, sniffy or not. Specifically, it can be noticed that the level of individuals independence sets if a situation is to a greater extent about conformity (unconscious but voluntary acceptance of the norms), or compliance (internal or external acceptance) or obedience (total accordance to social power) (Cook et al. , as cited in Franzoi, 2009 Franzoi, 2009). Focusing more one the smell of conformity and the influence o f social norms, there are specific factors that tint conformity and levels of social norms influence on it.These factors can be situational, personal and cultural. Situational factors can be group size, group viscidity, and social support. crowd size is important because as Asch (1955) found, the larger the group, the bigger the phenomenon of conformity due to social norms. Group cohesiveness makes the group to have greater bonds due to similarity and ability to easily show empathy to each other (Christensen et al. , 2004) and social support is noticed to groups with higher levels of cohesiveness and bonding. On the other hand, there are personal factors ffecting the type of conformity such as self-awareness (ability to understand own self), self- debut (try to present ideal self in order to conform), personal control (desire to feel that one has control, as a human right, over particular(a) situations) and gender (gender differences- women are more potential to conform) (Franzo i, 2009). Based on all the previously referred material, conformity is all driven by social norms, norms that are not written but sometimes are more powerful than law the way that a person conforms to society affects the level and type of his compliance to societys requests.For example, if a person has as personal characteristic not to like altering his self-image/ presentation based on societys preferences due to his intense belief in independence, it is possible that this person will comply more difficult because of external motivation instead of internal. On the other hand, this means that if a person has an internal compliance only to smile to people who knows and not to anybody else due to his belief, this will affect the way that he conforms to the social norm of smiling to people in general in order to be kind.This shows how social norms can affect conformity and consequently compliance and the other way around, respectively. Furthermore, people have a tendency to create and maintain meaningful relationships with other people because they deprivation socializing as human beings, which is called as affiliation. Affiliation is a good example of internal compliance. This motivation makes the compliance to socializing and dedicating energy and time on building relationships, an internal acceptance for personal developing (Franzoi, 2009 Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004).Nevertheless, there is the issue of how and when external compliance to social norms such as stereotyping occurs. In particular, Bargh and Chartrand (1999) did a hit the books on automaticity of behaviour and found that when people are unconsciously pre-occupied with e. g. stereotyping words, even if they believe that stereotyping is wrong, they are likely to stereotype because they unconsciously externally comply with the given stimuli. Stereotyping is a form of social norm. People whitethorn stereotype in order to protect themselves for example, filthy aggressive people on the street may be perceived as thieves or criminals.So there are two outcomes on this example. One person may believe that the appearance cannot indicate anything about personal characteristics but in the end he conforms to the social norm and try to avoid him as the other people around him do (external compliance). On the other hand, one may truly believe that these kinds of people are definitely criminals because he big businessman have a bad experience in the past so he avoids him due to his belief (internal compliance to the social norm of avoiding this kind of people) (Franzoi, 2009 Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004 Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).Rimal and Real (2005) did a study on how perceived norms affect human behaviour with college students in order to investigate intentions to alcohol consumption. They proposed the theory of normative social behaviour that includes three mechanisms injunctive norms (such as social approval), outcome expectations (such as personal benefits) and group identity (such as similarity). Their speculation was that these three mechanisms are able to moderate the influence of social norms on the human behaviour. Indeed, their results showed that these normative mechanisms could prefigure the intention of alcohol consumption to college students.Consequently, this study is a clear answer to the question whether social norms affect human behaviour. In addition, Rivis and Sheeran (2003) did a study on Theory of planned behaviour in order to find out whether added descriptive norms can be good predictors of human behaviour in the particular model. Their results showed that younger participants and health risk behaviours are greatly related to stronger correlation between intentions of behaviour and descriptive norms confirming that behaviour is affected by norms.As a conclusion, the general point of view in all these theories and facts is that social norms affect human behaviour through the state of conformity and compliance. Substantially, the intentions o f behaviour can be affected either implicitly or unadornedly. People conform to the society in order to be accepted and comply with various social norms that conformity requires through implicit/internal or explicit/external way. Even if personal and situational factors may influence the level of compliance and conformity, people constantly comply with various requests either due to personal beliefs or due to accepting others personal beliefs.Word count 1. 440 References Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 31-35. Bargh, J. 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