Evan Davis Quotes

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.

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

Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

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

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

Peer pressure plays a huge role in people's desire to get married.

Modern morality is all about perception.

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.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

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

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

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Conventionality is not morality.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

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

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

Morality is a social necessity

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

It's a bit weird; everybody is trying to be different, but then they're exactly the same as whatever mob they hang out with.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.