Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.

Kids get influenced by other kids.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.

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

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Peers often matter more than parents.

Society becomes how we behave.

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.

I had a great high-school experience. I had a lot of friends that I'm still really good friends with, but there's always times where a group can't understand what the individual is experiencing, or you're going through something at home that you can't bring to school and have a total understanding among your peers.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

People influence each other, so one screening will be filled with laughs while another is dead silent.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

You need a good support system when you're trying to make positive lifestyle changes. If everyone is eating burgers and fries while you're having fish and salad, it's easy to lose your willpower.

Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.