Standing up for beliefs can make you feel confident
Going with the flow might appear easier when confronted with unanimous disagreements. However, standing up for your beliefs, expressing your opinions and demonstrating your core values can be a positive psychological experience and make you feel confident about yourself, a study reveals, says IANS.
The findings showed that when trying to reach a goal, evaluating high resources and low demands leads to a mostly positive, invigorating experience called a challenge, which corresponds with feeling confident. Low resources and high demands lead to a much less confident state called a threat, which may produce feelings of anxiety.
There can be a clear divergence between what people do and say and how they feel, the study said. "People can show conformity, but going along with the group doesn't mean they are going along happily," said Mark Seery, Associate Professor at the University of Buffalo, in New York, US. "The external behaviour isn't necessarily a good indication of their internal experience," Seery added.
To provide insights into what it's like being alone against the group, the team tapped into the experience of participants using psychophysiological measures, and by assessing their cardiovascular responses. The team, thus, got a sense of how people are evaluating personal resources versus the demands of the situation while in the act of potentially conforming.
The researchers assigned participants into one of four experimental conditions, each with a goal to either fit in with a group's political opinion or assert their individuality, and with a group that either agreed or disagreed with participants' opinion on the issue. The results showed that when participants' goal was to fit in with a group of people who disagreed with them, their cardiovascular responses were consistent with a psychological threat state.