Minority Influence

Question 1

What is minority influence?

Answer 1

-Where smaller groups (minority) influences the belief of other people
-Leads to internalisation with the individual changing public and private behaviour (longer lasting)

Question 2

What are factors affecting Min. Inf?

Answer 2

Consistency
-Being consistent and having unchanging views will influence someone better
-When confronted consistently you cause someone to genuinely rethink their position
-Consistency portrays correctness and commitment
-Minority will consistently disrupt to force the majority to become involved

Question 3

What are the 2 forms of consistency?

Answer 3

Diachronic consistency
-Consistency over time (same view held for long periods of time)

Synchronic consistency
-Consistency across members (all members hold same beliefs and back each other up)

Question 4

What were the aims of Moscovici’s Blue Green Study?

Answer 4

-To investigate the role of a consistent minority upon the opinions of a majority

Question 5

What was the procedures for the blue green study?

Answer 5

-Participants placed in 36 groups of 6
-Each group had 4 real and 2 confederates
-Participants told they were taking part in a study of colour perception
-Each group shown 36 blue slides with different shades
-In consistent condition, confederates wrongly said the slides were green
-In inconsistent condition, confederates said 24 were blue but 12 were green
-All answers were given to the whole group

Question 6

What were the findings of the blue green study?

Answer 6

-8.2% agreement between the minority in the consistent condition with 32% agreeing once
-Only 1.25% in the inconsistent condition

-Consistency is the important variable in swaying the majority as a minority

Question 7

What are 3 weaknesses to blue green study?

Answer 7

Lack ecological validity
-Most research is based off of experiments done in labs
-The findings will most likely not be applicable to real life or how we would really react or be swayed
Means findings of minority influence lack ecological validity so limits what they can tell us about real min Inf in real life

Problems with population validity and sampling
-Members of women’s, gay, animal rights, Greenpeace, tree hugger people all will operate in very different ways
-Face much different constraints and will live their life trying to make change
-Artificial tasks and groups cannot fully explain what it is really like for these types of people or how min Inf really works
Unable to represent and simulate wide differences that separate mins with majs

Gender bias
-Used female participants because he thought they’d be more interested in colours ( really? come on)
-Makes the sample unrepresentative only using one gender and how they behave to influences
May well be a gender difference to conformity and influence which has been missed because of only using females