Women may be especially motivated to maintain the positive affect of others, or to at least limit the negative affect. (Daubman, and Sigail 75)
This tendency towards conforming to the group may also be the basis behind the psychology of eating disorder in young adolescent women attempting to conform to the norm. This normative social pressure may explain women attempting to attain Somme idealized ideal body type by extreme forms of diet and exercise creating such eating disorders as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. As early as the 1960's researchers found that 70% of the high school girls surveyed were unhappy with their bodies and wanted to lose weight:
It seems plausible that the forces that lead a woman to feel she must downplay her accomplishments and assets might contribute to her feeling inadequate in a number of domains, including her abilities to manage her life, her relationships, and even her own internal emotional states. (Mahalik et al.)
Roles in conformity also have been found to parallel helping and pro-social behaviors in their gender variance. The relationship between gender and pro-social/helping behavior also varied depending upon the type of helping being examined. "...helping that was more heroic or more chivalrous was exhibited more often by young men than young women, whereas helping embedded in a relational context was exhibited by young women more than young men." (Carlo, and Randall 34) it was also noted that adolescent boys tended to exhibit more pro-social behavior in public than did adolescent girls, leading to the possibility that boys may have also have more of a tendency to conform to normative behavior in public. Women also have been noted to have a tendency towards nurturing behavior than men, possibly owing to the often cited maternal instinct. Therefore lending themselves by their gender classification alone to be more of a facilitator and exhibit more conforming behavior especially towards close friends and family. This set of characteristic may also lead to norms also associated with social roles and job classifications that tend to frame women's responsibilities in more nurturing and caring ways. (Belansky, and Boggiano 647-648) Conversely:
According to Eagly and Crowley (1986), men develop skills to help people in heroic ways based on the jobs males typically occupy or expect to occupy. Traditional male jobs like fire fighters and police officers require workers to put themselves in risky situations in order to perform their job. Again, the norms associated with men's jobs may shape the kinds of skills they acquire. (Belansky,...
Gender and Communication: Breaking Gender Barriers in the Workplace Gender barriers have existed within the workplace ever since women in America came out of the kitchen and went to work during World War II. Like with any new experience of empowerment, when the men came home, the country's women were wholly a changed group. Women had entered the workforce, and they were there to stay, despite the misgivings of much of
Conformity and Obedience BEYOND CONSCIOUS AWARENESS Influences of Conformity and Obedience The Concepts of Conformity and Obedience Compared Obedience is a form of social influence in which a person of authority makes a direct command to someone to perform something (McLeod, 2007). It involves changing one's behavior according to the commands of authority (Brehm, Kassin & Fein, 1999 as qtd in Southerly, 2012). Conformity is another form of social influence brought about by social
In addition, the researcher note that the relatively small sample size in their study did not allow separate genetic analyses for males and females (Coolidge et al.). Environmentalism (social influence). A recent study by Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis (2008) analyzed psychosexual outcomes of gender-dysphoric children at 16 years and older to determine childhood characteristics related to psychosexual outcomes based on various social influences that may be experienced during the timeframes studied.
Gender The challenges families face include lack of social support, lack of guidance, lack of information, prejudice, and hostility. Gender roles and norms are entrenched in the society, making it difficult for children and their parents to resist or subvert conformity. The media and all social institutions perpetuate gender roles and norms. Yet when parents are willing to encourage gender fluidity or gender nonconformity, children and their parents are liberated from
Gender Stereotypes and Body Image The media's influence in western culture is pervasive. Through magazines, television and print ads such as billboards, advertisers have consistently adopted gender stereotypes in terms of body image, and use these stereotypes to sell their products. Although it is certainly no secret that the stereotypical womanly ideal is slender to the point of unhealthy, the body image presented as the male ideal is similarly unrealistic. Men
The amount of knowledge that we have (even setting aside the amount of wisdom that might accompany this) tends to make people more sure of themselves and thus less subject to want to change themselves to match others. We determined to test the above ideas about a relationship between age and the urge to conform. Our hypothesis was the following: Older adults (40+ yrs) will conform less than younger adults
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