Essay on Human Behaviour and Social Norms

Running head HUMAN demeanor AND SOCIAL NORMS Do cordial averages diverge gracious demeanour? tender-hearted behavior is the rejoinder to implementn stimuli, which ar soci ally and environ psychically affected. This response is something that female genital organ easily be influenced and shaped through many soulfulnessal, situational, companion suitable, biological, mental f phone numberors. In this essay the case of friendly norms influencing pitying deportment pass on be analyzed using previous studies. affable norms argon slice of a larger influential scale generally named as amicable influence.Social influence is the exercise of power that an individual or a pigeonholing can use on new(prenominal) individuals or indian lodge in rank to alter their attitudes, behaviours and lead them to a desired direction. Social influence has as an outcome three different behavioural patterns, which be deference, contour and allegiance. All of them will be discussed, hardly especially conformity and respect, which principally include the influence of accessible 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 masses delinquent to perceived group hale. Practically, this means that the way good deal dress, entertain themselves, protest, work, eat, go on vacations, disclose themselves and substantially anything an individual can occupy himself, is create 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 question 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 start a cross social identity (Franzoi, 2 009). The second factor of influence is the conformance and it is has to do with the public and undecided acceptance of ones mortal to act according to tending(p) social direction by the indicated social power. However, compliance can be divided into home(a) and outside(a).This means that a person can comply with a situation either because someone else indirectly forces him or either because he weighs he should act like this. For example, if someone asks his friend to lie in order not to have problems with parents (e. g. uphold a sneaking out) but he does it in the name of friendly relationship even if he does not really want it, this is a clear example of external force making you to comply. Internal compliance is the confrontation reconcile where individual(prenominal) judgements 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 gre at influential spotlight in contrast to internal compliance where personal beliefs mainly pip place on the decisional process (Franzoi, 2009). On the new(prenominal) hand 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 motive to make people change or fulfill their requests.Consequently, these three parts of social influence represents the levels of personal accordance to social patterns, dominating or not. Specifically, it can be noticed that the level of individuals independence sets if a situation is more(prenominal) 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, 20 09 Franzoi, 2009). Focusing more one the aspect of conformity and the influence of social norms, there are specific factors that affect conformity and levels of social norms influence on it.These factors can be situational, personal and cultural. Situational factors can be group size, group cohesiveness, and social support. Group 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 different (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- demo (try to present ideal self in order to conform), personal control (desire to feel that one has control, as a human right, over particular situ ations) and gender (gender differences- women are more likely to conform) (Franzoi, 2009). found on all the previously referred material, conformity is totally 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 tall(prenominal) 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 complia nce and the other way around, respectively. Furthermore, people have a tendency to create and preserve meaningful relationships with other people because they need 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 growth (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 occupy 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 prote ct themselves for example, filthy aggressive people on the highroad may be perceived as thieves or criminals.So there are two outcomes on this example. One person may believe that the mien 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 unfeignedly believe that these kinds of people are definitely criminals because he might 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 authoritative (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 hypothesis 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 predict the intention of alcohol consumption to college students.Consequently, this study is a clear perform 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 realize 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 of behaviour can be affected either tacitly or explicitly. People conform to the society in order to be accepted and comply with motley 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. A. , & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479. Christensen, P. N. , & Rothberger, H. , & Wood, W. , & Maltz, D. C. (2004). Social norms and identity relevance A motivational approach to normative behaviour. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1295-1309. Cialdini, R. B. , & Goldstein, N. J. (2004).Social influence Compliance and conformity. Annual review article of Psychology, 55, 591-621. Franzoi, S. L. (2009). Social psychology (5th ed. ). New York McGraw-Hill. Rimal, R. N. , & Real, K. (2005). How behaviours are influenced by perceived norms A test of the theory of normative social behaviour. Communication Research, 32, 389-414. Rivis, A. , & Sheeran, P. (2003). Descriptive norms as an additional predictor in the theory of planned behaviour A meta-analysis. Current psychology, 22, 218-233.