social influence -> minority influence Flashcards
(23 cards)
What is minority influence?
Involves an individual or minority persuading a larger group to accept their argument, even if this challenges the view held by the majority
What does minority influence lead to?
Internalisation or conversion, in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviour
What are the three main factors involved in minority influence?
- Consistency
- Commitment
- Flexibility
What does consistency refer to?
The minority must be consistent in their opinion and retain it over time
What are the two types of consistency?
- Synchronic consistency - people in the minority are all saying the same thing
- Diachronic consistency - they have been saying the same thing for a long time
What does commitment refer to?
When the minority shows commitment to their cause or views
How do minorities demonstrate commitment?
By engaging in extreme activities that are at some risk to the minority
What is an example of commitment?
Rosa Parks remaining in her seat in the whites-only designated area when asked to move
What is commitment also referred to as?
The augmentation principle
- majority pays more attention to their actions being taken and is therefore more likely to integrate it into their personal viewpoints, augmenting its importance, due to the personal sacrifice made by the minority
What does flexibility refer to?
The way in which minority influence is more likely to occur when the minority is willing to compromise
- this means they cannot be viewed as dogmatic and unreasonable
How does being inflexible prevent influence?
If the minority is seen as being inflexible and uncompromising then the majority are unlikely to change
- the minority should balance consistency and commitment with flexibility so they don’t appear too rigid
What research is there into flexibility effecting minority influence?
- Nemeth (1986) constructed a mock jury in which there were three genuine participants and one confederate
- participants in groups of four had to agree on the amount of compensation they would give to a victim of a ski-lift accident
- When the confederate would not change from a low amount which seemed unreasonable, the majority stuck together to a much higher amount
- However, when the confederate changed his compensation offer a bit, so did the majority
What are these three factors causing people to think about a topic referred to as?
‘Deeper processing’
- Important in the process of conversion to a different, minority viewpoint
What increases the rate of conversion from the minority to majority viewpoint?
The snowball effect
What is it called when the minority view becomes the majority?
Social change has occurred
Who studied minority influence?
Serge Moscovici (1969)
What was the aim of Serge’s research?
To see if a consistent minority could influence a majority to give an incorrect answer in a colour perception task
What was the procedure of Serge’s research?
- His sample consisted of 172 female participants who were given eye tests to ensure that they were not colour blind
- They were told that they were taking part in a colour perception task
- The participants were placed in groups of four participants and to confederates
- Pps were shown 36 slides which were different shades of blue and were asked to state the colour of each slide out loud
- In the first condition, to confederates answered green for each of the slides. This as the consistent condition
- In the second condition they answered green 24 times and blue 12 times. This was the inconsistent condition
- A third control group as used for comparison with the experimental group without confederates
What were the findings of Serge’s research?
- Muscovici found that in the consistent condition, the real participants agreed on 8.2% of the trials, whereas in the inconsistent condition the real participants only agreed 1.25% of the time
- Only 0.25% of the control group’s responses were green, the rest said blue
What were the conclusions of Moscovici’s experiment?
- Suggests that a minority can influence a majority
- A consistent minority is 6.95% more effective than an inconsistent minority
- consistency is an important factor in exerting minority influence
Evaluation: Research support for consistency and depth of thought -> strength
- Moscovici demonstrated that when the minority are consistent in their responses they had a greater influence on the majority than when they were inconsistent
- This figure was approximately 6x more influential
- Supported by Wood et.al who conducted a meta-analysis of 100 studies of minority influence and found consistent minorities were always more influential
- Suggests consistency is a major factor in minority influence
- Martin et.al (2003) gave pps a message supporting a particular viewpoint (on voluntary euthanasia) and measured their support
- One group of pps then heard a minority group endorsing the same view
- Another group of pps heard a majority group endorsing their initial viewpoint
- Pps were then exposed to a conflicting view and their support as measured again
- People were more likely to stick to their original opinion if they believed it as shared by a minority group than a majority one
- Suggests the minority message had been more deeply processed and had a more enduring effect
Evaluation: Methodological issues -> limitation
- Judging the colour of a slide is an articifical task and therefore lacks mundane realism, since it does not occur everyday
- Research conditions are criticised for being far too removed from cases of real-world minority influence such as political campaigning
- The implications of real world cases are also grossly disproportionate to those seen in a lab setting as they can, for some people, literally be cases of life or death and as such Muscovici’s reseach lacks external validity
- Limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real life social situations
Evaluation: Population validity -> limitation
- Muscovici used a biased sample of 172 female pps in America
- Unable to generalise the results to other populations, for example male participants, and we cannot conclude that male pps would respond to minority influence in the same way
- We might expect women to be more conformist than women due to gender-related social norms and expectations, so the findings may not be confidently applied to men
- America is culturally individualistic and therefore may be less conformist than more collectivist cultures
- Further research is required to determine the effect of minority influence on male and non-American pps to improve the low population validity of this experiment
