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Why Do People Conform To Social Influence?

In the lives of humans, not only does society play an important role in shaping our lives, but also, we would be just lone, idle soils wandering around in the absence of this society. And in varied ways, society influences us knowingly and unknowingly. And as per psychologists, there are varied types of social influences. Each of these influences have different characteristics and are defined as per those. So which are those characteristics? Let's have a look: Informative social influence: This definitely has got to do something with information – and yes, that's what it is. The need for us as people to have the correct information – information that's true to the core, authentic with no hint of fakeness is what we want. And when we aren't able to get this information or approve it by ourselves, we turn to the people around us, hoping that they will be able to provide us with what we aren't able to search by ourselves.
  And when this happens, you have subjugated yourself to informative social influence, via which you get think you've got the facts right – without really questioning whether they're actually right or not. Normative social influence: You can easily describe this as something that you do as a person to fit into the standards cast by the society - with the sole goal and objective of ‘fitting in.' To create your place in any given group, you tend not to put forth or voice out your opinions and what you actually think about something, but instead prefer to go with what the group says, just so that you won't be left out. While this is attributed to normal human behavior, too much being under the normative social influence can be harmful to your growth as a person. Conformity can also happen in two subtypes – public conformity or private conformity. Public conformity comes in when you dislike something to the core, yet you go on pretending to like it just because you have to fit in with the public. Most of us do this, especially when it comes to our group of closest friends whom we often hangout with. On the other hand, private conformity is when you did not like what the people around you did, but did it anyway and then realized that you like it! This is like privately acknowledging that you have allowed the people around you to influence you.
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