Conformity literature review

Conformity literature review

Conformity is being influenced to change behavior in line with a group that one identifies the most with. In most cases, we are influenced by gender to conform to certain behaviors that are considered norms. Rice, Fallon, and Bambling carried out a study to determine the influence of masculinity conformity on men’s mental health throughout their lifespan. The researchers hypothesized that men who conformed more to masculinity were more likely to experience high levels of depression than those ones that did not. The researchers collected data online from two samples of men in Australia. The first sample consisted of 343 participants, while the second consisted of 525 participants. The variables that were measured were masculinity and depression. The results depicted a relationship between high conformity to masculine roles and high levels of depression throughout the lifespan. The implication for this research was that it provided a purview of how gender affects the way men conform to certain roles, which in turn causes them to experience high levels of stress and depression.

Gender influence on alcohol abuse is an issue that has been under research for long. Bratberg et al. investigated how one’s gender influences alcohol use behavior in people. The study conducted in Norway sought to measure differences in men’s and women’s drinking behaviors over 20 years. The researcher relied on a number of past studies in three different time periods to carry out their research. The first period under scrutiny was 1984-1986, while the second era studies were between 1995 and 1997, and the last one was between 2006 and 2008. The crossectional study between the three periods focused on a single area in Norway. The information collected in the survey was based on self-reported data by individuals. The results depicted that alcohol consumption patterns had changed over the two decades. Alcohol consumption became rarer over time, and rates of alcoholism increased both in men and women. However, the study noted that women moved towards men drinking behaviors more than men moved towards women drinking behavior. The results depicted that gender played an influencing role in alcohol consumption behavior as women adopted male drinking traits more.

Dir et al. investigated how an adolescent’s gender influenced their likelihood of engaging in binge drinking. The researchers conducted a national document review and past document survey of binge drinking behaviors among adolescents in the United States. The results indicated that the gender gap between adolescents was narrowing down but increasing among girls in terms of alcohol abuse.  The gender convergence was due to conformity to what was perceived normal behavior, and without a doubt, female behavior adapted more to male behavior than the reverse. This is because females had a higher neurobiological vulnerability when compared to males. At the same time, males were documented as having a higher risk propensity when compared to the females. The literature review depicted that girls were more likely to conform to risky binge drinking behaviors due to male influence—fellow males than females more influenced males. However, at the same time, girls depicted a form of sensitivity towards conforming to social pressure to impress other people, especially their fellow girls.

Deviant behavior is an issue of concern, especially among adolescents. McCoy et al. investigated the effects of gender on conformity towards deviant behavior among adolescents and teenagers. The researchers conducted a qualitative review to determine the gender differences in the likelihood of peers conforming to risk-taking behavior. A total of 26 studies were reviewed with a particular focus on comparing male and female behavior when it comes to susceptibility to peer influence towards risk-taking behavior. The results indicated that female participants were more likely to be affected by peer pressure to conform to popular behavior than adolescent males. However, the findings portrayed that adolescent males were more aligned with risky behaviors that were associated with masculinity. The gender differences in conformity depict that males were more concerned with masculine behavior than females who were more likely to be influenced by males towards risky behavior.

Conformity towards heavy alcohol abuse has been of great concern for psychologists. French et al. researched in 2006 to determine how different genders were influenced to conform to alcohol abuse in adults and older adults in Australia, South Korea, and the United States. The research method used was a national representative survey of people who were predominantly 45 years old and above. The findings depicted that there were differences between the male and female participants in the way they changed their alcohol consumption behavior. The results showed that gender roles expectations and failure3s pushed people towards the risky behavior of alcohol abuse. For example, in South Korea, loneliness pushed women towards alcohol consumption and abuse. In the US, lower educated men were more likely to drink due to the expected status in society. Finally, in Australia, males were more likely to drink than women due to access to higher incomes. The gender roles determined how people were more likely to engage in drinking or not, showing that failed gender expectations influenced conformity in society.

Hypothesis

The hypotheses in the current study examined the effects of gender and comment priming on the interaction effect, which is conformity behavior. The first independent variable for the current study is comment priming. The second independent variable is gender. When it comes to commenting priming, we predict that conformity in the supporting consensus condition will be higher than those in the opposing and mixed consensus condition. We anticipate that for the gender independent variable, we predict that males will conform towards masculine behavior while females will conform towards traditional female behaviors. Also, in terms of prediction of the interaction between comment priming and gender conformity, we predict that participants in the gender variable will be highly conformed than those in comment priming. We also predict that participants in comment priming will be less conformed towards the two extremes because of the mixed consensus condition. The other two conditions will fall between supportive consensus condition in males and opposing consensus condition in females.