For example a football or dancing team. The member of this group feel a lot of loyalty towards all the other members. The out-group is the “enemy”, the group that is the strongest competition to your group, the one that may stop your in-group from fulfilling their goal. For example, a very good football or dancing team that has a very strong possibility of winning the competition instead of your in-group. These two groups generate conflict because the members usually fight each other and are enemies, since they feel they are the competition. The important thing here is to control oneself and not to allow your sense of loyalty and respect towards your in-group creates new enemies, which are the members of the out-group. Instead we should thank the competence, since they push us to be better and to keep practicing.
There are bad things about groups too. One of them is group conformity, which is how sometimes we don´t express our opinions or we do whatever the group members tell us to do in the fear that the group members won´t accept us anymore. For example, in the case of drug use in adolescents, peers are the ones that usually convince the adolescent to try drugs, as the results of an investigation about drug abuse in adolescents remarked: “Our findings confirm that peers had a strong influence on adolescent decisions to use drugs” (Bahr, 2005, pg 17). Another of the bad things is group think, which is closely related to group conformity. It´s when we accept one opinion as the correct one and we are closed to other points of view. It´s when we think like all the other group members so we are accepted.
So, we adolescents need to stop seeing the out-groups as enemies. Groupthink and group conformity is wrong, because it doesn´t allow people to be who they really are. Sometimes it is necessary to listen to orders of the group´s leader, but other times you can say no. Besides, great ideas can come from a big group of different opinions and believes. Groupthink only narrows thought, we should all think by ourselves and express our opinions, as long as they don’t hurt anyone, without the fear of not being accepted. We should also be careful when choosing our primary group, since, whether we want it or not, it has a lot of influence on us.
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