Social Influence and Conformity Impact Covid 19

TRANSCRIPT

Good day to you everyone and this is Louize Aznavour. At one point I entered into the game of saying wear your mask, try to do everything that the government wants. So on and so forth however there comes a point where and also I am a firm believer in “if you don’t have what you love-love what you have”. So adapt, and see the larger picture all this is just fine and dandy, but two years into the situation “mask no mask”, “wash your hand”, “keep your distance”, “get injection”, “no injection” and then people being labeled as anti-vax or pro-vax-somehow those in power perhaps ought to be extremely careful not to divide the human being and I’m talking as a clinical psychologist, because more and more I’m seeing my patients more in fact feeling inundated, having too much of demand is not a good thing for the health professionals either, because we might end up feeling helpless, hopeless ourselves in terms of wanting to posh the magic wand which is not necessarily working.

It concerns me when I hear from my especially younger generations of 25 45-ish group, saying things like you know if I were hit by a bus I wouldn’t mind life cannot go on like this and these are not depressed people, these are not depressive type people, they are doers movers shakers, earning good money, they have jobs etc-however if I do see in a couple where they have felt the need to call the police in and they are higher up vice presidents, etc good articulation, they know how to communicate and if these people end up wanting to call the police in, or they don’t know what to do with children. The children are losing their ability to be in public and have social dancing back and forth. So, we got to where we got as caring and cooperating human beings yes or no? – yes! Okay, so at one point we’ve got to get back to society, we’ve got to get back to being human in terms of the interactive processes that have to take place, can you believe this? In our building the management is writing in the newsletter-please smile at each other, please be very kind to one, the traffic laws of society are being unraveled. So it is not? Whether we have the covid 19 or we don’t have the covid 19 etc…

The leaders have to think in terms of what is this situation of isolating and dividing humanity from one another, is going to be leading humanity to. So, let us be very aware of this. I would like you to watch the video, on the classic dr. ash experiments on social influencing.

“The ash experiment is one of psychology’s oldest and most popular pieces of research. A volunteer is told that he’s taking part in a visual perception test. What he doesn’t know is that the other participants are actors and he’s the only person taking part in the real test which is actually about group conformity”.

“The experiment you’ll be taking part in today involves the perception of line length your task will be simply to look at the line here on the left and indicate which of the three lines on the right is equal to it in length so example”.

“The actors have been told to match the wrong lines, the volunteer will be monitored to see if he gives the correct answer, or if he goes along with the opinion of the group and gives the wrong answer.

Once again the correct answer is two”. “Three”. “Three”. “Three”.

“The ash experiment has been repeated many times and the results have been supported again and again”.

“We will conform to the group again we’re very social creatures, we’re very much aware of what people around us think. We want to be liked, we don’t want to be seen to rock the boat so we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying-we’ll still go along”.

“I think an important thing to note about this experiment is it’s important to speak out whenever you feel that you may be thinking differently from the people around you. I believe communication is a very important takeaway from this experiment as ash actually mentioned in one of the experiments when all the confederates could talk they became more confident that the participant was correct”.

Covid 19 was a good learning period for all of us. I hope we became more alert and the ash experiments also taught us something telling us that bling conformity is not the way to go, because we then end up taking the wrong decisions- obeying just to obey, because we may be timid and incapable of asking questions wanting to follow not want to be shunned away from the society for all reasons such as and even some diplomas of professionals being taken away, so on so forth. Freedom of expression ought to be there all the time, ridicule not forming developing, and ideas come through asking questions, and debating in a healthy society.

Otherwise bling conformity today may become a habit-forming for societies that in fact may love freedom. So, then there for let us ask questions, do our own research debate not be timid not feel intimidated at the end of the day this is our life and we want to live in societies, where people look into each other’s eyes, rather than want to be isolated, because of fear from one another.

Be aware of all these! Love you!