The Importance Of Conformity In Social Psychology

Social psychology and its fundamental ideas surround us. Social psychologists explore people’s actions and the motive behind them, especially in different contexts and situations. Their results and findings can be seen in many human exchanges. For instance, in the summer of 2014 I decided to get a gym membership from my local gym. As summer was approaching, my friends began to care more about their appearance. This was due to the new “beach body” fad that was occurring in my school. People wanted to look and appear nice in their bathing suits when they went to beach, which was why this fad became increasingly popular. Slowly, more of my friends started getting a gym membership and began working out. Some of them focused more on being toned

Conformity is known as a change in one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. Basically, conformity is defined as a behavioral change, as a result, of the beliefs and actions of others. Conformity is very important in social psychology terms because it demonstrates that how people act or behave in a certain social situation will affect how other people decide to act and behave, as well. In this case, I conformed and got a gym membership. I changed my behavior from not having a gym membership to being a member of my local gym because all my friends decided to join the gym. They had an influence on me, and this was why I decided to conform to their

The elaboration likelihood model can be used to demonstrate why I was persuaded when to get a membership when I finally went to the gym. This model is defined as a model explaining in which persuasive communications cause attitude change: centrally, when people are motivated and have the ability to pay attention to the arguments in the communication, and peripherally, when people do not pay attention to the arguments but are instead swayed by surface characteristics. This idea is based on the premise that the likelihood that an argument is persuasive is based on the two persuasive routes. The two routes are the central route and the peripheral route to persuasion. The central route to persuasion is the instance when people listen to an argument carefully and evaluate the argument logically because they the motivation to listen to the communication. The other route to persuasion is the peripheral route to persuasion. The peripheral route to persuasion is defined as the case in which people do not elaborate on the arguments in a persuasive communication, but are instead swayed by peripheral cues. The peripheral route to persuasion is based on peripheral cues and superficial characteristics of the message or the person who is giving the message. For instance, some common peripheral cues are the attributes of the communicator and the