Mentality In Brave New World

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No matter where one goes, there seems to always be common desire to “fit in”. People feel the need to conform to what others are doing in society by doing things they wouldn’t normally do otherwise. Members of the society in the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley believe that everyone is happiest when everyone is equal, and acts just like everyone else. Why do people feel the need to be like everyone else? Deindividualization and group mentality present in society today has many explanations, and directly relates to the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The knowledge of being in a group tends to make actions that generally seem unacceptable appear admissible. To get a better idea of why this happens, psychologist Phillip Zimbardo …show more content…
In contrast, the students in the role of prisoners became compliant to their inhumane orders and easily broken. No one from either of the two groups spoke out against what was happening. Although the experiment was planned to last two weeks, it was stopped after only six days due to the brutal treatment of the prisoners. The results likely concluded a scary thought: “...the inclination to conform is thought to suppress oppressors' ability to engage intellectually with the fact that what they are doing is wrong” (Haslam). Even though unconsciously all they likely knew that what they were doing was overstepping the boundaries of their authority, the guards did so only because of the name of their roles and because everyone else was doing it. The same goes for the prisoners. Although the Stanford Prison Experiment was an extreme example, it parallels a common need to fit in because everyone in the experiment was conforming, no matter what role they played. In the book, Group Dynamics: Edition 5, Donelson R. Forsyth states, “When individuals gain power, their self-evaluations grow more favorable, …show more content…
The tendency for a person to join a group is present throughout the entire book in the way that everyone follows what everyone else does. For example, in the beginning of the novel, the character Lenina is dating a man named Henry Ford. She has been dating him for four months, which feels good to her, but is almost unheard of in her society. Upon telling her friend, Fanny, she responds by saying, “...you ought to be a little more promiscuous…” (Huxley 43). In this society, not doing so makes you an outcast. Even though Lenina doesn’t feel quite right about it, she changes her mind about only being with one man because of what other people do. This relates to the way people pretending to be guards in Zimbardo’s experiment all partook in violence without speaking up just because others were doing the same thing. It also relates to Baumgartner’s experiment because she showed more favorability towards being part of her own group rather than separating from it. At another point later in the novel, we find that the character known as Mustafa Mond similarly conforms to society. In the novel he says, “‘I was given the choice; to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my pure science, or to be taken on to the Controllers’ Council with the prospect of succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership’” (Huxley 227). Instead of practicing his individualism far away from others, he chooses to be

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