th and feel part of the mainstream culture. According to Luchins & Luchins conforming to social pressure can make an individual’s sense of right and wrong go askew “social pressure can cause people to judge incorrectly”. Luchin & Luchin’s experiments showed that subjects agreed with an incorrect answer after they heard it from multiple outside subjects. This also correlates with the Line Test experiment, in which, one line is clearly longer than the others but through peers stating that other lines are longer the subject begins to believe that what they think is incorrect. Other examples include the “nearsighted” experiment conducted by Solomon Asch. A blatant example of conforming to social norms, are the 21 Bedouin women interviewed by Asali, Khamaysi, Aburabia and Letzer on the topic of Ritual Female Genital Surgery RFGS or circumcision. It was found that the most common reason for this practice was a need to conform to social pressure. The women interviewed indicated that their mothers were the main reason as to why they were circumcised and they are the reason why their daughters will be circumcised. The most alarming fact was the low regard the circumcised women held of the uncircumcised women. The women who were in majority (circumcised) believed that the minority (uncircumcised) were unclean and could not cook. Due to the minorities unwillingness to conform they are not allowed to secure a place in Bedouin society. I believe that the Bedouin women have the extreme form of conformity named groupthink. The characteristics of a groupthink include:Illusions of invulnerability Self-censorship Direct pressure on dissenters to conformIllusions of unanimity This subject of group thinking and conforming directly relate to the institution where all of these behaviorisms are most obvious. This is the societal necessity of learning. Allen and Bragg conducted an experiment in which they wished to explor...
