Normative Social Influence is defined a situation where people understand what they want, or they should do, however, because the majority of people is not doing that, so they change their mind to follow the group instead of doing what they want to avoid being awkward. When I participate in an overseas poster design competition in the US earlier this year, they have a party for the competitor to meet and build relationships. At the beginning of the party, even with the music start, no one dance as everyone just take the music as the background music of the dinner.
However, in the second half of the party, the DJ change the music to hip-hop and rock, some people from western country start dancing. After they start dancing, more and more people join them, and they form a pool in the middle of the hall. My team member and I start looking around to see how many people still left as we don’t really want to dance. However, by the time past, more and more people start to join their dance, so we also join them as we just don’t want to be awkward.
However, when we tired and come back to the seat, I realized the teachers and leader of groups they didn’t join the party dancing. So, I looked around and pay more attention to the people who are dancing currently. I find out that all the people who are dancing are all wearing very fashion like clothes or wearing makeup and none of them looks like a teacher. Most people who don’t really care about the dress code of party. Even though most people in this party consider as kind of Artist, the Normative Social Influence seems still work on us.
As my friends after leaving the pool for ten minutes, she starts feeling awkward and trying to convince me to join the group back with her again. So, it is very clear that depends on human nature, we don’t want to be different most of the time. Yes, Artist is always trying to do something very different in their life, but it doesn’t work forever. At least when the young artist attends those social events like a party, they will be trying to follow the majority to avoid making some ‘wrong movement’ or ‘weird behaviour’. I think it is because people feel that if they behave weird, other people will not interact with them anymore.
When they scared about this, they will get Normative Social Influence and trying to behave like the rest of people.
