The Destructive Power of Peer Pressure Essay - 1408 Words

Peer pressure and acts of mass blind obedience are all too common occurrences in our everyday society. A person, who under any other circumstances would never act in such a way, will commit unthinkable acts when backed by a single person or even worse, a large mass of individuals. It’s almost always destructive, and the person or persons involved usually always end up feeling regretful and bewildered by their actions. When thinking about group peer pressure, there are several other words that come to mind such as; conformity, compliance, brainwashing and social influence. Group peer pressure can make a person with the purest morals and the highest values act in ways that are more than contradictory. Group peer pressure†¦show more content†¦(Orwell 2007: 476) The above statement leads one to believe that this is the underlying theme of the entire selection. It was the hype and pressure that Orwell received from the crowd of locals that led him to shoot the elephant. He expressed that he consciously knew the shooting was a â€Å"serious matter† (Orwell 2007: 476) and compared the killing of such an animal to â€Å"destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery† (Orwell 2007: 476). Even after Orwell dismisses the idea of killing the elephant, he eventually makes the decision to carry out the shooting to avoid looking like a â€Å"fool† (Orwell 2007) and being laughed at by the natives. It becomes more obvious that he felt a great deal of remorse over the killing in the final paragraphs of the selection. Had he felt no remorse, then he would not continue to justify his actions long after the fact. This shooting obviously created an internal moral struggle. He is finally able to make the conclusion that because t he elephant had killed a villager, it put him â€Å"legally in the right† (Orwell 2007) and gave him â€Å"sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant† (Orwell 2007). The pressure Orwell felt from the group led him to conform to the desires of the villagers. His own personal beliefs and morals were of no significance. Although he internally believed that the shooting was wrong, he complied outwardly with the majority and went on to commit the act that the villagers wereShow MoreRelatedHistory Of Obedience And Conformity1729 Words   |  7 Pagesmanagerial style, which is â€Å"a more widespread form of authority†(Mermillod et al., 2015). Mermillod et al. (2015) summarized that people do not require coercive pressure such as Milgram’s experiments to be destructive. While coercive pressures result in higher levels of obedience, people will act destructively as an agent for the authoritative power in an agentic state. 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