Minority Influence

Question 1

What is minority influence?

Answer 1

• where one person or a small group influences the behaviour and beliefs of other people
• minority influence is most likely to lead to internalisation
• Moscovici et al. (1969) got people in groups of 6 to look at 36 blue coloured slides and state whether they were blue or green
• in each group there were 2 confederates who consistently said green

Question 2

What are the 3 factors that a minority has to have to influence the majority?

Answer 2

• consistency = synchronic consistency (all saying the same thing) or diachronic consistency (all saying the same thing for a while)
• commitment = engage in extreme activities to draw attention and prove that they care
• flexibility = Nemeth said that members need to be able to adapt and compromise with their ideas
• with minority influence all 3 of these need to be present to slowly ‘convert’ people with the snowball effect

Question 3

What are 2 strengths of minority influence?

Answer 3

• strength of research support for consistency from Moscovici et al.’s blue-green experiment as it was meta-analysed and the groups where the confederates where consistent were the most influential in change - reliable
• strength of research support for deeper processing as Martin et al. (2003) delivered viewpoint to people and said either minority or majority agree - those in the minority agree group were less willing to change their opinion showing that minority influence involves deeper processing and leads to internalisation - reliable

Question 4

What is a limitations of minority influence?

Answer 4

• limitation of artificial task like Moscovici’s experiment so it doesn’t reflect real world situations like jury decision-making - lacking in external validity and lacking in application