Minority Influence Flashcards
(9 cards)
Minority influence
Minority influence refers to situations where one person or a small group of people (i.e. a minority) influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people. This is distinct from conformity where the majority is doing the influencing (and thus conformity is sometimes called majority influence). In both cases the people being influenced may be just one person, or a small group or a large group of people. Minority influence is most likely to lead to internalisation - both public behaviour and private beliefs are changed by the process.
Serge Moscovici first studied this process in his “blue slide, green slide’ study (see below left). This study and other research have drawn attention to three main processes in minority influence.
Consistency
The minority must be consistent in their views. Over time, this consistency increases the amount of interest from other people. Consistency can take the form of agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic consistency - they’re all saying the same thing), and/or consistency over time (diachronic consistency - they’ve been saying the same thing for some time now). A consistent minority makes other people start to rethink their own views (Maybe they’ve got a point if they all think this way’ or ‘Maybe they’ve got a point if they have kept saying it’).
Commitment
The minority must demonstrate commitment to their cause or views. Sometimes minorities engage par par an fin Per mi
in quite extreme activities to draw attention to their views. It is important that these extreme activities present some risk to the minority because this shows greater commitment. Majority group members then pay even more attention (Wow, she must really believe in what she’s saying so perhaps I ought to consider her view). This is called the augmentation principle.
Flexible
Charlan Nemeth (1986) argued that consistency is not the only important factor in minority influence because it can be off-putting. Someone who is extremely consistent, who simply repeats the same old arguments and behaviours again and again may be seen as rigid, unbending and dogmatic. This approach on its own is unlikely to gain many converts to the minority position. Instead, members of the minority need to be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counterarguments. The key is to strike a balance between consistency and flexibility.
Snowball effect
All of the three factors outlined above make people think about the minority’s view or cause.
Hearing something you already agree with doesn’t usually make you stop and think. But if you hear something new, then you might think more deeply about it, especially if the source of this other view is consistent, committed and flexible.
It is this deeper processing which is important in the process of conversion to a different, minority viewpoint. Over time, increasing numbers of people switch from the majority position to the minority position. They have become ‘converted.
The more this happens, the faster the rate of conversion. This is called the snowball effect (like a snowball gathering more snow as it rolls along). Gradually the minority view has become the majority view and change has occurred.
Strength- research
Moscovici et al blue/ green slide study showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on changing the views of other people than an inconsistent opinion.
Wood et al carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential.
Strength-support- deeper processing
Change in majority’s position does involve deeper processing of minority’s ideas.
Martin et al (2003) presented a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured participants agreement. One group then heard a minority group agree with the initial view while another heard a majority group agree. Participants finally exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured again. People were less willing to change their opinions if they had listened to a minority group than majority. Suggests minority message had been more deeply processed and had a more enduring effect.
C-Counterpoint Research studies such as Martin et al.s make clear distinctions between the majority and the minority. Doing this in a controlled way is a strength of minority influence research. But real-world social influence situations are much more complicated. For example, majorities usually have a lot more power and status than minorities. Minorities are very committed to their causes - they have to be because they often face very hostile opposition. These features are usually absent from minority influence research - the minority is simply the smallest group.
Therefore Martin et al’s findings are very limited in what they can tell us about minority influence in real-world situations.
Limitation- artificial tasks
One limitation of minority influence research is that the tasks involved are often just as artificial as Asch’s line judgement task.
This includes Moscovici et al’s task of identifying the colour of a slide. Research is therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life. In cases such as jury decision-making and political campaigning, the outcomes are vastly more important, sometimes even literally a matter of life or death.
This means findings of minority influence studies are lacking in external validity and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-world social situations.
Moscovici research
Moscovici et al. (1969) demonstrated minority influence in a study where a group of six people was asked to view a set of 36 blue-coloured slides that varied in intensity and then state whether the slides were blue or green. In each group there were two confederates who consistently said the slides were green. The true participants gave the same wrong answer (green) on 8.42% of the trials, i.e. agreed with the confederates.
A second group of participants was exposed to an inconsistent minority (the confederates said ‘green’ 24 times and ‘blue’ 12 times). In this case, agreement with the answer ‘green’ fell to 1.25%.
