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As I blog this morning, I've listed my mood on my MySpace as 'contemplative'.
Yes... I'm thinking... ruh roh! LOL ;)

And there are two things on my mind:
One is conviction and the other is group dynamics.

For the majority of my life I haven't been a 'joiner' really. There was no need to belong. Oh, I've joined certain groups at specific times in my life for very specific reasons. But, for the most part, I don't and have never "needed" that kind of socialization. Many of the groups have found me and it has been a blessing to belong and be accepted ~ but a place where "everybody knew my name" (Norm! ;) has never been nor will ever be a goal for my life or a necessity for my core.

I can remember my earliest years being one of a lot of alone time ~ reading in my room hour after hour, day after day. Happy as can be! Or I'd be outside in the drive laying on the hood of my dad's station wagon in the evening looking up at the stars for hours, dreaming... always dreaming. I admit it. I was/am a weirdo! LOL

I've always lived somewhat in 'space' and by myself. Never needing a lot of friends ~ although I have always felt friendship for everyone I met. I like people. I just don't need groups of them. I can enjoy the social experience of a group for what it is and then simply 'go home'.

Several years ago the Internet exploded in my life almost out of nowhere and suddenly I was thrust into all these group situations. I had a medical issue and went online to research and that is when I found "forums" of people who 'talked' without 'speaking' every day to each other. Through a medical forum I belonged to I found another about marriage and relationships. It was there in 2000 that a gal named Nancy assessed me with the following words:

"You're so open-minded, I'm surprised your brain doesn't fall out."

It was meant to be derogatory and in a group setting, as a humiliation tactic. My first online experience with obedience and group mentality. I found the whole interaction extremely interesting. Let's just say I didn't back down from my thoughts and took her remark as a compliment at the time. Living without judging others was a "pride" of mine. "Live and let live" was my motto.

One that has since gone by the wayside btw. You see, you can't live with conviction in your own life without having an opinion about how others live theirs. We all judge. How well we tolerate differences in others is where the line gets drawn. There is little tolerance for differences in a group dynamic. It is what it is.

There is a saying, "You have to stand for something or you'll fall for everything." Standing there alone in a group holding on to your own convictions is a hell of a lesson in character strength. Been there done that, have the t-shirt. Groups can make or break people... and they do.

I have definite convictions about who I am at my core. I know *me*. After years and years of living, no one will ever be able to tell me who I am and, believe you me, for many years the only voices I heard were those of others telling me who I was supposed to be. In my uncertainty and insecurity, I believed others over *me* for a long time.

From the very first time I stood up for myself and took my life back on January 24th, 2004, I haven't allowed anyone or anything to make me deviate from my own code or make me acknowledge anything about myself that wasn't true. I have stood true to my core. No matter the pain. No matter the loss. No matter the cost. No matter the price. And I live without regrets for doing so.

We tend to listen more to others subconsciously than we will ever consciously admit. It is a long road to erase tapes of the other's voices in our minds that tell us who we are ~ even after we've grown and changed. BUT ~~~ it can be done.

It has been my experience that joining a group is similar to allowing others to tell you who you are at your core. It takes a strong person to stand up to a single person, let alone group mentality. To stand up for what you believe in when a group is involved is probably the toughest assignment you will ever experience in this education called life. A growth experience like no other actually.

I was talking with a friend yesterday about the courage it takes to be who you are in the world today and he told me of a few studies that have been done in group dynamics. It has been a fascinating read to say the least! Many of you probably already know about these studies but for me it is the first time I have heard of them. The links are below.

Bottom line is most people want to belong to some group somewhere. They will almost give up their convictions to feel included. To belong. They will give up their opinions. They will give up their values. The will give up their friends. Their family. Their lives. Some will give up their souls. All in the name of "acceptance".

What's sad is most people don't realize that if you truly accept yourself at your core, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. You go from a place of *need* to simply a place of *want* when you can stand on your own and be who you are without anyone else. You don't need a group to exist. You alone have value and worth. The only acceptance any of us needs is *our own*. Look not outside yourself for your self-worth. People will always let you down.

Anyway, those that want to stay in the 'fold' of a group will conform. Those that don't or won't conform will be forsaken by the others. So, this leads me to my initial wondering about conviction and group dynamics:

When it happens to you, and it will if you belong to anything, what do you think you will do?

Where is the line for you?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Obediency and group mentality

Submitted by Allison Z on Mon, 05/05/2008 - 3:31pm.

Biology 202 Web Paper 2

The issue of personality and morals is an interesting one, and one that causes a great deal of confusion. In general, people’s character traits remain fairly consistent. However how are we then to reconcile this with the fact that when in a group or under the orders of an authority figure, people behave very different than they do otherwise? “Group mentality” is an issue that has plagued people for ages, as it questions how much control people really have over their actions. Studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment study how randomly selected people react in different social situations, and the results are frightening. The Stanford Prison Experiment showed people adapting to their roles as either prisoner or guard alarmingly quickly with brutal results, and the Milgram experiment showed that people are willing to kill if ordered to by someone else. Recent studies suggest that computer models can predict mob behavior, using a mathematical equation. This forces one to question to what extent actions are determined by free will and personality, and to what extent by surroundings and basic human nature.

Studies consistently show that if given the means and permission to do so, people can quickly become surprisingly sadistic. One study that shows this, as well as the influence of surroundings and peers, is the Stanford Prison Experiment. There were 24 participants in the study, but because of the guards’ shifts they were always outnumbered by the prisoners. The prisoners were treated as such, forced to wear smocks with their numbers on them, and made basically powerless by those people hired as “guards”. While these people all knew they were participating in an experiment, the situation quickly escalated into realistic situations and cruelty. After only a day the prisoners rebelled, and this caused the guards to become stricter and harsher. One guard suggested using psychological methods to control the prisoners (who outnumbered the guards), and the situation quickly escalated to routine humiliation. Prisoners had to earn the right to food and bathroom privileges, and they were split up into groups that were treated better or worse at random, creating discord among the prisoners. Slowly both the prisoners and guards began acting more and more like their roles dictated. The guards came up with new and inventive ways to humiliate their prisoners and keep them in line, and the prisoners became “zombie like,” and referred to themselves as their numbers. (1)

It is difficult to reconcile this experiment to common sense, as it seems unlikely that within the course of only 6 days people could convert so thoroughly to their roles. In his book The Lucifer Effect, (2) Zimbardo connects the lessons he learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment to real life situations such as the torture that occurred in Abu Ghraib. On this subject he also says: “The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel… It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people.” (3) He posits then that it is not the people committing these atrocities that are to blame, but the social structure (or government) that creates situations in which people commit them. The idea he suggests here, that virtually anybody can be driven to torture and torment given the right situation, is a frightening one.

Another frightening example of this change in personality based on societal role is the Millgram experiment. For his experiment, the experimenter had a confederate (a person involved in the study but pretending to be a volunteer) and an actual volunteer where one (the volunteer) was picked to be the “teacher” and one (the confederate) the “learner.” The confederate always mentioned that he had a heart condition as well. They were then separated and put into 2 rooms, where the subject could hear but not see the confederate. The “teacher” was given a voltage generator, and was told to ask the learner a series of questions. He was also instructed to administer a shock to the other participant when the learner got the questions wrong. The voltage was upped each time, and the learner began to make distressed sounds, before ceasing all sound entirely. The teacher would be told, to varying levels of intensity, that he had to continue the experiment. 65% of the participants continued to shock the presumably passed out learner until allowed to stop, and while they questioned the head of the experiment and were very uncomfortable continuing, they nevertheless did. (4) While some may question the people used in the study, not only did it consist of a diverse group of subjects, but it has been replicated all over the world, with the same results.(5)

The ramifications for this experiment are huge, as they suggest that a solid majority of people are subject to the power of authority. As Milgram states: “A commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society. But if one considers that almost two-thirds of the participants fall into the category of "obedient" subjects, and that they represented ordinary people drawn from working, managerial, and professional classes, the argument becomes very shaky.” (6) Here Milgram states the most disturbing but interesting things about these experiments. One cannot simply confine these actions to those of evil, but rather aspects of humanity. Whatever ultimately causes a person to act the way they do, basic universal brain programming unquestionably plays a part.

Both the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment look at the behavioral psychology of human beings. To what extent are people in control of their own actions, and to what extent are their behaviors written into their subconscious? The atrocities committed in places such as Abu Ghraib are not isolated, and in fact people posit that they are not even the result of bad people. Rather they are the result of human nature, and the way people’s very brains are structured. While I do believe that it takes certain personalities to react to the above situations the way these people did, there is a universality that suggests that one cannot simply judge these actions and say “not me.” Rather they must confront the fact that there is something biological about the brain that causes it to listen to authority and conform to stereotyped roles. It is an unsettling thought but an important one, for it is only when we can understand this that we can truly begin fixing the problems it causes. This does not make torture or murder acceptable, but it does suggest that we must look farther than just the actions, and perhaps work to combat the problems as they arise from biology, rather than just society.