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Amanda Webb

May 8, 2008

Essay 2-ENG 102

Social Influences on teens today

What is peer pressure? Peer Pressure is the social pressure on one of a peers group of friends to take a certain action or behavior because that's what everyone else is doing. Teenagers today are starting to: drink, smoke, have sexual interactions and use illegal drugs and a much younger age. This is caused by peer pressure because today teens are willing to do whatever it takes to fit into so what the so called “popular” crowd. Most teenagers have the goal to fit into these so called groups or cliques and it takes over all of the other goals as which they had originally had from the beginning, goals such as getting good grades throughout you middle school and high school years and graduating from high school in college, and causing them to give into all the wrong things.

In the article "The Perils of Obedience" written by Stanley Milgram, he tells about his experiment to test the problem between obedience to authority and one's conscience to tell what is right and wrong. In this experiment, Milgram found that most people will do what they are told from an authoritative figure even when its going against there own moral beliefs. The study was set up as a "blind experiment" so they were able to capture when and if the person will stop causing pain on another as they are continuously told to continue doing so. The participants of this experiment included two volunteers: one was called a teacher and the other was called a learner. The teacher being the person that is being tested and the learner is just an actor. Both volunteers were told that they would be involved in a study that tests the effects of punishment on learning. The learner was strapped into a chair that resembles a miniature electric chair and the teacher saw them be strapped in and then the teacher was sat in a room with the experimenter. The teacher...