Benjamin Wade Quotes

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

Everybody thinks that I did this and I did that, but I just went along with the times.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I don't need to hang out in a posse and try to act cool.

My message isn't perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.