Group Ideologies And Beliefs Affect An Individual's Personal Knowledge

To what extent do group ideologies, behaviour and beliefs affect an individual’s personal knowledge? Personal Knowledge can be defined as the resulting ideas of an individual obtained through life experiences and different processes of the ways of knowing, which are emotion, faith, imagination, intuition, language, memory, reason, and sense perception. Thus it changes through their life. It majorly consists of an individual’s values, ideals, interests, and abilities; and therefore is harder to transmit through individuals than shared knowledge. Shared knowledge is product of the union of many people contributing with their ideas, which are usually added through time and in different places. It is divided into the different areas of knowledge;

This experiment proves that the knowledge and ways of a group have an effect on the individual’s ways and knowledge to a great extent; this has ways of knowing involved, such as the emotional need to conform to the group triumphs over what the individual believed was true due to sense perception (what they saw).

This suggests that what individuals believe to be shared knowledge affects and shapes their personal knowledge, leading to the question: does conformity to group ideas reduce the reliability of the knowledge gained by an individual (when shared knowledge shapes personal knowledge)? With this study, it is evident that this is in fact true because emotion interfered to create knowledge through conformity making the knowledge gained unreliable and

This area of knowledge also contains evidence suggesting that group ideologies, behaviour and beliefs (shared knowledge) affect an individual’s personal knowledge. A way of explaining this is by looking at the hippie movement of the 60s. The hippie subculture, born as a youth movement, had an enormous effect on culture; they influenced artists, music, TV, literature, and film. However, this sub-culture took a long time to influence substantial amounts of people because its growth, expansion, and popularity took many years to occur, with only some individuals having relatively small influences with their ideas (personal knowledge). This can be seen by looking back at the origins of the hippie movement; it goes as far as to the Ancient Greeks, starting with the ideals of specific philosophers, also with specific contributors such as Henry David Thoreau, Buddha, and Ghandi, with their spiritual and religious ideas. These ideas gave birth to greater movements with organised people spreading hippie-ideals partly through the arts; personal knowledge shaping shared knowledge through emotion, imagination, language, and other ways of knowing. The fact that the movement took long periods of time to be something recognised was precisely because individual knowledge is harder to transmit. What spread and fastened the growth of this movement was the socio-economic situation of the