Social Influence And Social Change Flashcards
What is social influence
The process by which individuals and groups change each other’s attitudes and behaviours
Three types of social influence
Conformity, obedience and minority influence
What is social change
Occurs when whole societies rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things. Eg women’s suffrage
Six steps in how minority influence creates social change
- Drawing attention through social proof
- Consistency
- Deeper processing of the issue, people begin to think about the unjustness of situations
- The augmentation principle, risked their lives for the cause, not acting out of their own interest
- The snowball effect, gradual change from minority to majority support
- Social cryptomnesia (people have a memory that change has occurred but don’t remember how it happened)
What is social cryptomnesia
When people have a memory that change has occurred but don’t remember how, no memory of the events that led to the social change
How do environmental and health campaigns appeal to normative social influence
By providing information about what other people are doing eg reducing litter by printing normative messages on litter bins like bin it-others do
What is gradual commitment as proposed by Zimbardo
Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes much more difficult to resist a bigger one so people ‘drift’ into a new kind of behaviour
Expand on strength that there is research support for normative influences
-Nolan et al investigated whether social influence processes led to a reduction in energy consumption in a community
-they hung messages on front door houses in San Diego every week for one month, key message was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage
-as a control some residents had a dif message that just asked them to save energy
-found significant decrease in energy usage in the first group= shows that conformity can lead to social change through the operation of normative social influence
Expand on weakness that minority influence is only indirectly effective
-social changes happen slowly when they happen at all eg it has taken decades for attitudes against drink-driving and smoking to shift
-Nemeth argues that the effects of minority influence are likely to be mostly indirect and delayed, indirect as majority influenced on matters only related to the issue at hand not the central issue itself and delayed as effects may not be seen for some time
-shows effects of minority influence are fragile and it’s role in social influence very limited
Expand on limitation that there may not be deeper processing involved in minority influence
-Moscovici argues that minority and majority influence involve different cognitive processes with minority influence causing individuals to think more deeply about an issue than majority influence
-Mackie disagrees and presents evidence that it is majority influence that may create deeper processing if you do not share their views as we like to believe that other people share our views and think in the same way as us
-when we find that a majority believes something different we are forced to think more deeply about their arguments and reasoning
-central element of the process of minority influence has been challenged and may be incorrect which casts doubt on the validity of Modcovici’s theory
