Minority influence. Flashcards
What is minority influence?
- Minority influence is a type of social influence that motivates individuals to reject established majority group norms.
- It refers to situations where one person or a small group of people (minority) influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people.
What is conversion?
- Conversion through minority influence usually occurs through informational social influence, where a minority provide new info and ideas to the majority.
- Minority influence therefore takes longer to achieve than majority influence because time will need to be taken for individuals to re-examine their beliefs and behaviour in light of the new info that the minority are advocating.
Contributing factors to minority influence: 1. Consistency.
Being consistent and unchanging in a view is more likely to influence the majority than if a minority is inconsistent and chops and changes their mind.
What is the augmentation principle?
Includes the minority placing themselves at risk to demonstrate to commitment to their cause. Majority tend to pay more attention to the actions being taken and the personal sacrifices made by the minority.
Key study: Moscovici (1969) - Method.
- Sample consisted of 172 female p’s, placed in groups of 6 and shown 36 slides which are all varying shades of blue. The p’s had to state out loud, the colour of each slide.
- Two of the 6 p’s were confederates, and on one condition (consistent) the two confederates said all slides were green.
- In the second condition (inconsistent) confederates said that 24 of the slides were green, and 12 were blue.
Key study: Moscovici (1969) - Findings and conclusions.
- In the consistent condition, real p’s agreed on 8.2% of the trials, whereas in the inconsistent condition, real p’s only agreed on 1.25% of the trials.
- Moscovici’s results show that a consistent minority is 6.95% more effective than an inconsistent minority and that consistency is an important factor for minority influence.
Contributing factors to minority influence: 2. Commitment.
When the majority is confronted with someone with self-confidence and dedication to take a popular stand and refuses to back down, they may assume they have a point.
Contributing factors to minority influence: 3. Flexibility.
- Refers to the way in which minority influence is more likely to occur when the minority is willing to compromise and accept counter arguments.
- If the consistent minority are seen as inflexible, they will be unlikely to change their views of the majority. However, if they appear flexible and compromising, they are likely to be seen as less extreme. As a result, they will have better chance of changing majority views.
Nemeth (1986): Method.
Believed that consistency was not the most important factor in minority influence, suggesting it can often be misinterpreted as a negative trait.
P’s in groups of 4 had to agree on the amount of compensation they would give to a victim of a ski-life accident. One of the p’s in each group was a confederate, there were 2 conditions:
1. When the minority argued for a low rate of compensation and refused to change their position (inflexible).
2. They compromised by offering a slightly higher rate of compensation (flexible).
Nemeth (1986): Findings and conclusions.
Findings: In the inflexible condition, the minority had little or no effect on the majority. However, in the flexible condition, the majority members were much more likely to also compromise and change their view.
Conclusion: Nemeth’s research highlights the importance of flexibility and questions the idea of consistency, suggesting that striking a balance between the two is the most successful strategy for a minority to adopt.
Limitation of Moscovici’s study: Used biased sample of all female p’s from America.
P: Used biased sample of female p’s from America.
E: Means were unable to generalise results to population. We cannot conclude male p’s would respond to minority influence in same way.
C: Therefore, Moscovici’s research lacks population validity due to its generalisation issues.
I&D: Research criticised for being gynocentric – female p’s only.
Limitation of Moscovici’s study: Breach of ethical guidelines.
P: Breach of ethnical guidelines during his study.
E: He deceived his p’s, they were told they were taking part in colour perception test, rather than experiment on minority influence. Means Moscovici didn’t gain fully informed consent.
C: Although seen as unethical to deceive p’s, it could be argued it was necessary in order to achieve valid results.
Limitation of Moscovici’s study: Methodological issues of research into minority influence.
P: Methodological issues with research into minority influence.
E: Judging the colour of a slide is an artificial task and therefore lacks mundane realism, since it’s not something that occurs every day. These research conditions criticised for being too far removed from cases of real world minority influence, such as political campaigning.
C: Implications of real world cases are significantly disproportionate to those seen in lab setting as they can, for some people, be the causes of life and death. Therefore, research lacks external validity.
