Social influence and social change Flashcards
(10 cards)
What is social change?
Over time
Beliefs attitudes and behaviours of society
Replaced with new norms and expectation
What is social cryptomnesia?
People have a memory that change has occurred but don’t remember how it happened
What is process one of consistency?
Ensures message appears more credible and convincing.
What is process 2 of augmentation principle?
Majority pays attention to selfless and risky behaviour of minority
Pay attention to self sacrifice made
More likely to consider minority opinion into their own when they realise that minority are willing to sacrifice themselves due to how much they believe in this value and want to get their point across.
What is process 3 of snowball effect?
Once minority has gotten attention of some of majority group
The more and more people start to pay attention
Until minority view becomes majority view
What is process 4 of normative social influence?
Reporting what behaviours and attitudes the majority are displaying
This urges others to follow this behaviour to fit in.
Eg. a poster to encourage more people to recycle may read ‘recycle, everyone else recycles’
What is an evaluation for social change?
Research support for role of normative social influence
Research was investigating if NSI led to reduction in energy consumption
Found that group who received a message stating that others were saving more energy significantly reduced amount of energy they were using compared to control group.
What is an evaluation of social change?
Concepts can’t be empirically tested
Augmentation principle
Deeper processing
NSI can’t be empirically tested, don’t know if they are truly taking place, lack of scientific credibility.
Theory based on pseudoscientific concepts.
Explaining social norms and process of social change is highly subjective
What is an evaluation of social change?
Supporting research
Process involved in social change have methodological issues
Asch, Milgram, Moscovici all conducted supporting research
However they were all lab studies
Artificial tasks and environment
Aims very easy to guess, demand characteristics likely
Not reflective of real world
Lack external and internal validity.
What is evaluation for social change?
Evidence contradict Moscovites minority influence theory
Moscovici argues that changing to a minority view involved role deeper processing.
Mackie
Argues that deeper processing is involved when converting from minority to majority view
Because if the majority disagrees with you then it makes you think deeply about your own reasoning rather than other way round.
