Minority influence Flashcards
(17 cards)
What is minority influence?
A form of social influence in which a minority of people persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours.
Leads to internalisation or conversion in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviours.
What was Moscovici’s aim?
See if a consistent minority could influence a majority to give incorrect answer
What was Moscovicis procedure?
172 female participants
Groups of 6 people, 2 were confederates
Shows 36 slides of varying shades of blue
Participants had to shout out the colour of the slides.
Consistent condition - confederates said all 36 slides were green
Inconsistent condition - confederates said 24 slides were green and 12 blue
What did Moscovici find?
Consistent condition- participants agreed with confederates agreed on 8.25% of trails
Inconsistent - participants agreed with confederates on 1.25% of trials
What is consistency?
Minority must be consistent in their views.
Increases the amount of interest from other people.
What is synchronic consistency?
They’re all saying the same thing
What is diachronic consistency?
They’ve been saying the same thing for some time now.
What is commitment?
Minority must demonstrate commitment to their causes or views.
Engage in quite extreme activities to draw attention to their views.
Important to show some risk.
What is the augmentation principle?
People start to consider the view of the minority as they think that since the minority is willing to ask their life just to get their view point across then they must really believe in it and it must be right.
What is flexibility?
Makes minority look more reasonable and not off putting.
If a minority was consistent only and not flexible they would seem to right and that would be off putting
Flexibility is shown by being willing to consider the thoughts and opinions of other adapting their point of view and debating rationally.
What is deeper processing?
Individuals think deeply about what the minority is saying as it is a new and unfamiliar belief to them
What is the snowball effect?
Over time more and more people accept and internalise the minority belief.
The more this happened the faster the rate of belief conversion.
Until this minority view become the majority view.
When can we say social change has occurred?
Once the minority view has become the majority view
What is an evaluation of minority influence?
Research support for consistency
Wood et al
Carried out a meta analysis of almost 100 similar studies
Found minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential.
Suggesting that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement for a minority trying to influence a majority.
What is an evaluation of minority influence?
Research support for deeper processing
Evidence showing change in majoritys position does involve deeper processing of the minoritys ideas.
Martin et al
Message supporting a particular view point
Measured participant agreement.
One group then heard a majority group agree with it.
Participants were finally exposed to conflicting view and attitudes were measure again.
People less willing to change opinions if they had listened to a minority group than if they had listened to a majority group.
Suggesting the minority message had been more deeply processed and had a more enduring effect.
What is an evaluation of minority influence?
Counterpoint of Martin et al
Research studies make clear distinctions between the majority and the minority.
Doing this in a controlled way is a strength of minority influence research
Real world social influence situations are much more complicated.
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 hostile opposition.
Features are usually absent from minority influence research, the minority is simply the smallest group.
Martin et als findings are very limited in what they can tell us about minority influence in real world situations.
What is an evaluation of minority influence?
Artificial tasks
Tasks involved are often just as artificial as Asch’s line judgement task
Includes Moscovici et als task.
Research is far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life.
Cases like the jury - decision making and political campaigning, the outcomes are vastly important , sometimes even matters of life or death.
Meaning 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.
