Persuasion, Conformity, and Obedience in Social Psychology
This paper examines three foundational concepts in social psychology: persuasion, conformity, and obedience. Drawing on Myers's (2013) framework, it defines persuasion as attitude or behavior change through communication, identifying four key elements — communicator, message, channel, and audience — and distinguishing between central and peripheral routes. The paper then applies persuasion theory to video advertising, using Teixeira's (2015) research to illustrate how marketers capture consumer attention. In its second half, the paper explores conformity and obedience, explaining normative and informational social influence, before connecting these concepts to child development by analyzing how authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting styles shape children's conforming behavior.
- Introduction to Persuasion: Defines persuasion, its elements, and central vs. peripheral routes
- Persuasion in Advertisement: Applies persuasion theory to video advertising strategies
- Conformity and Obedience: Explains types of conformity and factors driving obedience
- Conformity and Obedience in Infancy and Raising Kids: Links parenting styles to normative social influence and conformity
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper consistently moves from abstract theory to concrete real-world application — defining each psychological concept first, then grounding it in a specific context (advertising or parenting), which keeps the argument accessible and purposeful.
- It maintains terminological consistency, introducing key vocabulary (normative social influence, institutional authority, central vs. peripheral route) in the theory sections and then reusing those exact terms during the applied analysis.
- The parenting-styles section is particularly well-developed, walking through all four styles systematically and tying each back to the same theoretical mechanism (normative social influence), demonstrating thorough analytical follow-through.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies concept-to-application scaffolding: each major section first establishes a theoretical framework drawn from a primary source (Myers, 2013), then introduces a secondary source (Teixeira, 2015; Boundless) as a real-world case study, and finally explains the connection explicitly. This two-step structure — theory, then application — is a reliable organizational technique for undergraduate psychology and social science essays.
Structure breakdown
The paper is divided into four sections. The opening section defines persuasion, outlines its four elements, and distinguishes explicit from implicit routes. The second section applies persuasion theory to video advertising using Teixeira (2015). The third section defines conformity and obedience, distinguishing three types of conformity and the factors that produce obedience. The fourth and longest section applies conformity and obedience theory to parenting styles, using normative social influence as the unifying analytical lens across all four parenting styles.
Introduction to Persuasion
Persuasion is defined as the process through which a message or information provokes a change in attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors (Myers, 2013). The change in thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, or beliefs that occurs through persuasion takes place without coercion or duress, but is largely influenced by the impact of the message or information on the individual. Persuasion tends to take place in a setting that involves communication, which entails conveying a message or information. Even though not all communication is designed to be persuasive — some is intended merely to inform or entertain — it can end up being persuasive based on the impact it has on the receiver. Therefore, persuasion is broadly understood as the process through which an individual's thoughts, behaviors, or attitudes are influenced by communication from others.
Based on this description, persuasion comprises several elements that act as pathways resulting in a change of attitude, beliefs, or behaviors through communication. These elements include the communicator, message, channel, and audience. With regard to the communicator, his or her attractiveness and credibility play an important role in the process of persuasion, while the content of the message determines the recipient's response and probable persuasion. The communication channel utilized by the communicator determines whether the experience is active or passive, while the audience element relates to thought processes and how recipients receive the message.
Persuasion can be explicit — that is, following the central route — or implicit — following the peripheral route — depending on the approach utilized by the communicator (Myers, 2013). Explicit persuasion takes place when interested individuals focus on the arguments in a message and respond with positive thoughts. In contrast, implicit persuasion takes place when individuals are influenced by incidental cues such as the communicator's credibility, and focus on signals that provoke automatic acceptance without critical thinking.
References
"Influence of Parenting Style on Child Development." (n.d.). Boundless. Retrieved March 28, 2016, from
Myers, D. G. (2013). Social psychology (11th ed.). Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Education.
Teixeira, T. S. (2015, October 14). When people pay attention to video ads and why. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review website: https://hbr.org/2015/10/when-people-pay-attention-to-video-ads-and-why
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