Social influence and social change

• Minority influence practical application

  Minority social influence creates social change. We can see this in greater detail when we look at a real-world example

  Case Study:

  Civil Rights movement in the 1950s
• Conformity Research

  Application

  • Environment and Health Campaigns
  • Appealing to normative social influence
  • Providing information about what other people are going.
  • Eg. Bin it - others do it or telling young people that most others young people don’t smoke
  • Social changed is encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing
• Obedience Research

  Application

  • Philip Zimbardo (2007)
  • Obedience can be used to create social change through a processes of gradual commitment.
  • Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes more difficult to resist a bigger one.
• Minority influence explains change

  Nemeth (2009): 

  • Minorities inspire the type of thinking that encourages social change
  • Minority views allow the majority to consider alternative ideas
  • This means the person actively thinks about the info they’re presented with
  • Leads to better decisions and more creative solutions to social problems

  Shows that having a dissenting minority stimulates and opens minds
• Research evidence for social norms intervention

  Nolan et al (2008):

  • Conducted research to see if there could be a change in people’s energy-saving habits in California as a result of social norm intervention
  • Asked residents to hang messages on their front door for a week - ‘most residents try to reduce their energy use’
  • Other residents had a message asking to ‘save energy’ but no reference to other people's behaviour
  • 1st group,  significant decrease in energy consumption

  Shows that majority influence can lead to social change
• Social norms & the boomerang effect

  Schultz et al (2007):

  • Social norms intervention helps target undesirable behaviour in a specific groups
  • But also affects behaviour of people who show behaviour more desirable than the norm.

  Nolan (2008) 

  • Found that residents who were using more energy than the norm reduced their usage to be more in-line with the norm
  • BUT…
  • Residents who were using less energy than the norm (seeing that they were using less than their ‘share’) increased their usage to be more in-line with the majority.
  • Boomerang effect.
• Social norms interventions don’t always work

  DeJong et al (2009):

  • Social norms intervention to reduce alcohol consumption in 14 different universities across three years
  • Students given normative information to correct their misperceptions
  • Students didn’t change their misperception of drinking in their peer group and didn't reduce their consumption
  • Shows that social norms interventions have limited influence, depending on the group and the behaviour
• Being perceived as deviants limits effectiveness 

  • In reality, when minorities try to change society, portrayed as deviants by majority.
  • Most people don’t want to be see like this so don’t align with the minority.
  • Minority gets reduced support.
  • Majority are successful at making people focus on the source of the message (the minority, ‘look how different they are to you’).
  • Most people fail to focus on the message itself.
  • Shows that minorities find it hard to influence people in the real world.