Conformity And Deviance Quotes

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial of women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, on from another, by defining "respectability" and "deviance" according to women's sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.

I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away.

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

In other words, groups use ostracism as a tool to discipline and minimize deviance. Not surprisingly, being at odds with their in-group is something most people would rather avoid altogether.

Illness is used to define wellness. Abnormalcy marks the boundaries of normalcy. Deviance demarcates the limits of conformity.

...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.

Conformity is reinforced within the group. Members feel more secure when someone gives their testimony, when doctrines and beliefs are repeated. Self-criticism is encouraged, individual differences discouraged. Expressing doubts or ideas that are unorthodox usually means punishment of some kind, from silence to criticism to outright ostracism. This group approval or disapproval is powerful enough to manipulate behavior. Especially for those who are attracted to the social support of a religion, the threat of shame is an effective deterrent for any deviance.

From integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experience, individuals construct a worldview, or frame of reference, that shapes their interpretations of objects and experiences.93 Everything is perceived, chosen, or rejected on the basis of this framework. The framework becomes self-confirming because, whenever they can, people tend to impose it on experiences and events, creating incidents and relationships that conform to it. And they tend to ignore, misperceive, or deny events that do not fit.94

Although the results may convince a wider audience, the “core set”—the working engineers and scientists most closely associated with the technology—understand the precariousness of this closure, for they are most intimately aware of the test result that does not conform to the others, the limitations of design, the ambiguity surrounding the various engineering interpretations that are embedded in day-to-day engineering work.