Now listen to part of a lecture in a sociology class on this topic.
(male professor) I have an example from my own life that illustrates this. When I first began my university studies, I became friends with a bunch of art students. They were older and fun and very creative and I thought they were really cool. And they all liked to dress really casually, in T-shirts and jeans and sneakers. That's what they wore all the time, to class, to the library, to dinner, everywhere, T-shirts and jeans and sneakers. So that's what I started wearing, too. And I fit right in, and I felt really cool.But then I graduated, moved to Chicago, and got a job. And I started working with some really bright, young people who'd already been working in the company for a few years, who were already handling major responsibilities for the company, really impressive. And sometimes some of us would get together on the weekend, maybe for a concert or a baseball game or something. And at first, I just wear a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers. That was, you know, how I was used to dressing. But I soon noticed that my co-workers preferred to dress up a little bit. The men would wear a nice pair of pants, uh, button-up shirt. The women might wear a fashionable dress and some nice shoes. They dress in clothes a lot nicer than what I was used to wearing. And I started thinking, you know, that looks really classy, really sharp. And so I started to dress the same way they did, you know, nicer, a little more formal. And, I don’t know, somehow my T-shirts and jeans and sneakers didn't seem as cool anymore.
Using the example from the lecture, explain how people’s behavior is affected by reference groups.
Reference group is the group of people who we admire and therefore impact on our attitude and behavior. In the lecture, the professor takes his experiences in college and in Chicago. When he was a college student, his reference group was a bunch of art students who really liked to wear T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, and this attitude influenced the professor, so the professor also thought it was cool to dress like that, and he did dress like that, too. However, when he began to work in Chicago, this changed as he met another group of young people who held major responsibilities in their company. He began to take those young people as his reference group, and of course they dressed differently, more formally, like button-up shirts, pants, and suits. So the professor no longer thought it was cool to wear T-shirts and jeans and he began to wear shirts and pants, too. (149 words)
