Group Pressure

Words: 649
Pages: 3

When Dragline and Luke fight in the prison yard, Luke refuses to give up. The fight is brought up when Dragline continues to speak about a woman that was seen while the chain gang was working. Luke tells him to stop beating the idea into the ground because the only thing it is doing is working the rest of the men up. Dragline challenges Luke to a fight the following day. Dragline beats Luke until he can barely get back up; however, Luke stubbornly continues to get back up until he is in danger of dying. While the rest of the prisoners advice him to stay on the ground, Luke tells them, “You're going to have to kill me” (CHL). It was a foreshadow of his untimely demise.

As a result of the stubbornness of the pair, they are able to rebel against the prison system after an injustice is done to them. The abuse that the pair endured would have beat anyone into submission, but they continued to live by their own morals. For Andy, his moral was that of never losing hope while Luke’s
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Asch, at Rutgers University, studied the effects of group pressure by subjecting a person to the contrary of a public opinion that contradicted the fundamental truth that person believed. In his report of the experiment, the social psychologist takes note of his subjects’ immediate choices and says, “[they] could act independently, repudiating the majority, or [they] could go along with the majority, repudiating the evidence of [their] senses” (Asch 144). Asch discovered that the majority of his subjects would follow the majority opinion. Andy and Luke repudiated the majority. As Red advised Andy to forget the hope of getting out of prison any day, and as the prisoners were advising Luke to give up in the fight with Dragline, they were neglecting to follow the majority. The stubborn refusal to leave behind their beliefs is what pushes them to rebel against the irrational authority that presides over them and