Going against the grain, saying no, is quite a difficult process.
In life there are several complicated words and phrases, such as sorry, I love you or it was me. But the most difficult of all is the word not. Take you the opposite It is not easy for others, especially at ages when the social approval it is almost indispensable. Also, there are people who have a harder time than others.
This is something we all know, but the effects that conformism can have on our mental health they are less known. This is precisely the topic of an article, recently published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, which states that people with tendencies conformists show that behavior due to a series of brain peculiarities and that, therefore, they develop great problems of anxiety when they try to follow their own opinions.
Say it's not complicated if you're a conformist
The scientific studies on the physiological bases of conformity, are a reality from the 50s, although none has been as complete as the one we are telling you today, which has been carried out by researchers from the Montash University, of Melbourne in Australia.
To do this, they took 39 volunteers, to which a series of questions while undergoing a magnetic resonance from your brain. The questions asked were, in many cases, general culture and before they answered they were told what he had supposedly answered another student or teacher of the University.
As expected, most of them tended to answer what another had already answered, regardless of whether he was a student or a teacher. This is so, because teachers are an example of knowledge and they are not supposed to be wrong and, on the other hand, to be against another student's answer, he opposes the social acceptance.
What happens in the brain of the conformists?
Those who tended to give conformist responses, without thinking about their own opinion, showed a very similar brain response among themselves. Specifically, increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior nsula, specialized in decision making and the perception of emotions and bodily sensations, respectively.
The simultaneous activation of these regions is usually associated with a process known as cognitive dissonance, consisting of the belief of two opposite ideas at the same time.
Furthermore, if these volunteers tried to answer based on their opinion, they developed symptoms associated with stress and the irritability,very common in people with cognitive dissonance.
This would also create feedback from the conformityThey will end up avoiding giving their own arguments in order to avoid the resulting stress. Surely you all know a person who is portrayed in what we have described in this article. Their task will always be to fight their problem to say no and yours will not take advantage of their facility to prove you right.
Source: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience