The Classic Coming-Of-Age Film The Breakfast Club

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The classic coming-of-age film, The Breakfast Club (1985), explores the psychological phenomena of conformity, attitudes, and behaviour. The Breakfast Club is a well-crafted narrative which explores the complexities of human behaviours as well as the impact of group dynamics. The film offers valuable insight into the social dynamics of ingroups and outgroups within society. In addition, the film provides a visual representation of how attitudes and behaviours change within these social groups. Conformity is the type of social influence which involves changing a belief or behaviour to fit in. Solomon Asch’s (1951) evolutionary exploration of conformity had confirmed the hypothesis that people tend to conform to a majority opinion to be accepted …show more content…

There are two main ways which can be used to persuade, the central route and the peripheral route. The central route involves the proposal of a strong and logical argument to alter a person’s attitude (Coufano, 2024). Contrastingly, the peripheral route evokes emotion to persuade, altering the affective and behavioural components of attitude (Coufano, 2024). In 1986, Petty and Cacioppo suggested the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which outlined these methods of persuasion. Their study had found that when participants were highly motivated and were able to clearly process the message, the argument strength was much greater and therefore, greatly influenced individual attitudes (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). ELM has the role of predicting behaviour of individuals and groups in society, however, in some cases, it may not be a sustainable way of predicting. This is because although using the central route may lead to a stronger change in attitude, it requires relevance for the receiver to change their attitude (Petty et al., 2009). Health ads, such as those about substance abuse, are designed to persuade people to change their attitudes. However, due to the use of the central route of persuasion, the advertisements are not guaranteed to resonate with everyone; the therefore, attitudes are not guaranteed to change (Petty et al., 2009). In The Breakfast Club, Bender latently uses both methods of persuasion through his suggestion “What do you say we close that door? We can’t have any kind of party with Vernon checking us out every few seconds.” Through this suggestion, he is using both his communication and logical skills to appeal to the groups cognition and affective component to persuade the group into closing the door. Bender is relying on the group’s logical reasoning that the detention would be a better experience if they shut the door and thus, appeal

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