Open Your Eyes to Conformity

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is curling up in my bed with a bowl of ice cream and throwing on the classic chick-flick, Mean Girls. The movie stars Cady Heron, a transfer high school student from Africa. Cady was home-schooled in Africa and therefore has never really been in a high school setting before. A little different from your typical high schooler, Cady found it difficult to fit in at first. However, soon enough Cady befriends the popular diva, Regina George and her clique of "Plastics". In order to become popular, Cady followed the advice of Regina in hopes that it would make her more accepted by her peers. This is known as Informational Social Influence. Changing the way she thinks and acts, Cady becomes someone that she eventually realizes she isn't proud of. The need to be accepted by Regina George and the popular kids at her high school resulted in Cady lowering her standards and losing the people who really cared about her.




Wanting the approval of the Plastics and the cute boy she had been eyeing, Cady conformed to the social norm and forgot about who she really was. This just goes to show how powerful the need for acceptance is. Cady's morals and values were transformed just to impress people she realized, she didn't even like. At first, Cady only wanted to impress people but she knew the way she was acting was wrong. This is one level of conformity known as public compliance. Before long, Cady started to genuinely believe in this new lifestyle and the power it created for her. This is a type of conformity known as private acceptance.

Another example of conformity at work is in the study by B. Murray Law. This study involves figuring out if super masculine husbands make for unhappy wives. The research resulted in some very interesting findings. "Men who display high hostility and strong conformity to masculine gender roles may cause distress to others, particularly their wives." This conformity that masculine gender roles create may be connected to a variety of characteristics in men such as "lower self-esteem, increased anxiety and depression, hostility toward women, fear of intimacy, homophobia and reluctance to seek help." To test how this affected the average married couple a study was conducted. In this study 60 married couples completed activities involving the Gender Role Scale, and 10 minute videotaped discussions on an area where they wished to see some sort of change in their marriage. The people controlling the experiment measured the results and looked to see how often the husband had hostile tendencies. Some results were as follows: As women rated their husbands on the Gender Role Conflict, the higher the scores, the higher they themselves scored on depressive scales and vice versa. therefore the results do show negative affects on the wives in this type of marital relationship. 

The findings of this study are really significant when looked at through the lens of conformity. Although not the main focus in the study, one has to realize how much of an affect conformity had on the study. It is men who conform to these masculine gender roles that have these marital issues. 

You can find conformity in your everyday life as well as many aspects of the world around you. Just open your eyes!

-- Megan Nemeth

http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct04/husbands.aspx

Murray Law, B. (2004, October 1). Do 'Super Masculine' Husbands Make For Unhappy Wives? Retrieved November 9, 2015.