Be yourself, no not like that, like everyone else.

You want to show people who you truly are but you’re afraid of being judged. You don’t want to be the different one, so you hide in the shadows.

Society has a habit of only accepting people if they act a certain way, dress a certain way. But here’s the thing: people were never meant to all be the same. We’re not made on an assembly line and put together the exact same way. It’s okay to be different; that’s how it’s supposed to be.

People often feel pressured to act or think a certain way or because of the desire to fit in. At Harvard University, a study was done on how somebody’s opinion will change depending on their peer’s opinions. Fourteen male college students were asked to rate how attractive 180 females were on a scale of 1 to 10. Shortly after, they were asked to do the same thing again but the females had a random rating that researchers said was the average score that their peers gave. The men gave significantly higher scores the second time around, being highly influenced by their peers supposed judgments. This research done shows how much people are influenced based on what their peers think. Even though the judgments weren’t true the men didn’t want to have differing opinions out of the fear of being judged.

How other people think you should act or think should not determine who you are. Often times, even if we think someone is wrong, we will still sway to group pressure. The Asch Conformity Experiments, done in the 1950s, shows this because college students were asked to choose the line that matched from three options on a card. Only one of the students was not aware that this was an experiment. They went through this 18 times and sometimes the actors would choose the right one or the wrong one. The subject always went last and over the course of the trials, 75 percent of the participants chose the wrong answer. Often times, that wrong answer matched the incorrect answer of the majority group. Even though the participants realized that the majority was wrong they still went with that judgment out of fear of being wrong or the “different” one.

Regardless of what other people think, you have to be yourself. At the end of the day, you have to live with who you are and you have to be the person that makes you happy. Be different, even if people don’t want you to.