Social influence - minority influence

• what is minority influence: refers to the situation where one person or a small group influences the beliefs and behaviours of other people
• What will minority influence most likely lead to?


  internalisation
• who first studied this process?

  Moscovici
• When did Moscovici investigate minority influence?


  1969
• What did Moscovici look at? who would be influenced by the minority
• What were Moscovicis conclusions? the more consistent we are in our responses, the more likely the participants were to be influenced by them
• what is consistency? where the minority stay united and keep the same views over time
• what is synchronic consistency?


  All saying the same thing
• what is diachronic consistency? all saying the same thing over a period of time
• what does consistency do to people? makes others rethink their views
• What is commitment? when you show commitment to the cause regardless of the risk
• what does commitment cause the majority of the group members to do? pay more attention (augmentation principle)
• What is the augmentation principle? The majority paying attention to the minority due to them doing drastic action.
• what is flexibility? minority should accept reasonable counter arguments from the majority
• who argued that consistency is not the only important factor because it can be off putting? Nemeth
• what may someone who is extremely consistent be viewed as? rigid and unlikely to gain converts to the minority position
• how do the three factors above make people think about the minority's view or cause? if you hear something new you may think more deeply about it - important in process of conversion to a minority viewpoint
• what do people do over time? switch form majority to minority position - conversion
• what is the snowball effect? the more his happens the faster the rate of conversion

  gradually the minority view has become the majority view and change has occurred
• strength - P - research evidence demonstrating the importance of consistency: E - Moscovicis blue/green slide study showers that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on changing the views of other people than an inconsistent opinion

  Wendy Wood 1994 - carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar stories and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential

  T - suggests that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement for a minority trying to influence a majority
• strength - p - evidence showing that a change in the majority's position does involve deeper processing of the minority's ideas: E - Robin Martin 2003 - presented a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured pps agreement

  one group heard a minority group agree with initial view while another group heard a majority group agree with it

  pps were exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured again

  people were less willing to change their opinions if they had listened to a minority group than if they had listened to to a majority group

  T - suggests that the minority message had been more deeply processed - enduring effect
• counterpoint to research support for deeper processing: E - research studies e.g martin et al make clear distinctions between majority + minority

  - strength of minority research = doing this in a controlled way

  BUT

  - real world social influence situations are more complicated

  - e.g majorities have more power and status than minorities

  minorities - committed to causes - have to be bc they face hostile opposition - minority = smallest group

  T - martins findings are limited in real world situations
• limitation - p - tasks involved are just as artificial as Asch's like judgement tasks: E - moscovic's tasks of identifying colour of a slide

  research doesn't show has minorities change behaviour of majorities in real life

  e.g in jury decision making and political campaigning, the outcomes are more important - sometimes life or death