Chapter !5

While listening to the presentation on chapter 15 I thought of a great example of normative social influence and how people will conform within groups for school projects.


I am a Social Work major,  which i quickly learned meant I would be apart of a group most of the time. For my final project I was in a group of six people that some how turned into nine people about a week before the final presentation was to be done. Naturally with nine people in a group there was not very much work to be divided. Two females within the group felt that the two males in the group were not contributing anything. What end up happening was 6 females in the group had a meeting discussing the two men. They came into the room and asked me to come into the hall and told me they did not want to put their names on the final project. I knew they expected me to agree because everyone else went along with this plan( normative social influence) , but naturally with my personality I disagreed and told them to say all of this to their face instead of having powwows in the hallway. Since I knew they were not going to say anything I decided to go in the room and be honest with the two males and give them some work to do. Even though  I knew this would make most of the group not very fond of me because I didnt conform,  I felt like this would not be the mature thing to do. I later found out that the other 4 girls did not agree with how the two group members were treated they just didn't want to speak up because they wanted to avoid any conflict.