Minority Influence Flashcards
What is minority influence?
A form of social influence in which a minority of people persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours.
What are the three aspects of minority influence?
Consistency, commitment and flexibility
What is commitment?
The minority must demonstrate commitment to their cause or views. They may engage in extreme activities to draw attention to this.
What is consistency?
Over time the minority must stay consistent. Synchronic (between the group)
Diachronic (over time).
What is flexibility?
Being too strict on your views can be seen as dogmatic. So having flexibility shows they are able to accept reason and counterarguments.
What is the snowball effect?
The idea that due to three aspects of minority influence (consistency, flexibility, commitment) the minority slowly becomes the majority over time
What happened in Moscovici’s study?
Group of 6 people asked to view a set of 36 coloured blue slides varied in intensity. Had to state if slide was blue or green.
Two confederates in each group said the slides were green.
True participants gave the wrong answer on 8.42% of trials.
2nd group exposed to inconsistent minority e.g said green 24 times and blue 12 times. Agreement of green fell to 1.25%.
3rd control group no confederate got it wrong on 0.25% of time.
What did Robin Martin (2003) find?
Presented a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured participants agreement. One group heard a minority group agree with initial view and other heard a majority.
Finally exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes measured again.
People less willing to change opinion if they had listened to a minority group as opposed to a majority group.
What could be a general limitation of minority influence studies?
Studies are just as artificial as Asch line judgement task.
E.G Moscovici, not reflective of real life conformity/obedience.
