Conformity

in the retail trade love conformity. Set up a craze, especially in the young and everyone will go for it. In fact, it's an ideal way to sell huge quantities of merchandise. The levels of conformity in consumerism are phenomenal. When you actually stand back and consider how easily we are persuaded that having certain items is the only way we can ensure peace of mind, you see what an important concept conformity is. Conformity has been described as 'yielding to group pressure' (Crutchfield 1962). However, this implies that other people put pressure on us to make us conform and this is not always the case. A better definition is given by Aronson (1976) who said it was a 'change in a person's behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people.' This would make more sense, as often the pressure we feel is imagined. The person or group he refers to would have to be important to us at the time, regardless of their status. There has been considerable research on conformity. One of the first studies looked at the answers people gave when asked to estimate the number of beans in a bottle (Jennes, 1932). If you have ever entered a 'guess the number' competition, you probably looked at…