The role of social influence processes in social change

Question 1

What is social change?

Answer 1

-Where society changes beliefs, attitudes and behaviour to create new social norms
-Occurs at gradual pace
-Social change can be good like increased rights for women
-And bad like the acceptance of euthanasia for Jews in the Nazi times

Question 2

What are the 6 steps to creating social change?

Answer 2

1) Drawing attention
-Raising awareness of the issue
2) Consistency
-Minority must stay true to their message
3) Deeper process
-Majority now think about the issue
4) Augmentation
-When minority performs risky action to make their message appear stronger
5)Snowball effect
-Majority slowly starts to move forward to minority position
6) Social crypto amnesia
-Majority have now changed their opinion but don’t know how or when

Question 3

African American Civil Rights movement and the 6 steps

Answer 3

Drawing attention
-1950’s America segregated Blacks and Whites
-Civil rights marches drew attention to this

Consistency
-Civil right fighters were consistent with their message of wanting unity

Deeper processing
-People who accepted the clearly unfair treatment now began to think deeper about it
-Eventually would begin to internalise with the different beliefs of segregation being wrong publicly and privately

Augmentation
-Freedom rides, Rosa Parks, sit ins
-Many of those involved understood and experienced the risks that came with disobeying the segregation laws
-But their work opened more eyes to the disgusting treatment they faced for simply not sitting in the right area based of the colour of their skin

Snowball effect
-1964 civil rights act was passed to prevent discrimination and segregation which shows at some point the majority joined the minority

Social crypto amnesia
-Social change 100% came into effect and the USA is a different place