Obedience: social influence and social change

• Social change refers to significant shifts in societal attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours over time. It often occurs when minorities influence the majority, leading to a change in social norms.
• Social influence is the process by which individuals and groups change each other's attitudes and behaviours. Includes conformity, obedience and minority influence.
• How Social Influence Leads to Social Change:

  1. Drawing Attention to an Issue
  2. Consistency
  3. Deeper Processing
  4. The Augmentation Principle
  5. The Snowball Effect
  6. Social Cryptoamnesia
• Drawing Attention to an Issue

  • Minority groups raise awareness of a social problem, creating cognitive conflict in the majority.
• Consistency

  • Minorities must maintain a consistent message over time to encourage the majority to rethink their views.
• Deeper Processing

  • When exposed to the minority’s views, the majority begins to think more deeply about the issue. This cognitive conflict can lead to internalization of the minority’s perspective.
• The Augmentation Principle

  • When minorities make significant personal sacrifices (e.g., risking arrest or harm), their commitment increases their influence.
• The Snowball Effect

  • Gradually, the minority view gains traction, converting a small number of people at first but eventually reaching a tipping point where it becomes the majority view.
• Social Cryptomnesia

  • Once a change occurs, people often forget how it originated. The new norm becomes accepted without remembering the minority influence that initiated it.
• Normative social influence (NSI) can promote social change by appealing to people’s desire to fit in.

  • Campaigns often use messages like “Most people recycle” to highlight socially desirable behaviours, encouraging conformity to positive social norms.
• One strength of explanations of social change is research support for the role of normative social influence. Nolan et al. (2008) found that people were more likely to reduce their energy consumption when they believed that other people in their community were also doing so. This suggests that conformity to social norms can lead to real-world social change. This supports the idea that normative social influence is a valid explanation for how social change occurs, increasing the credibility of this process in real-life applications.
• A limitation of minority influence in social change is that its effects are often indirect and delayed. For instance, it can take decades for attitudes around behaviours like smoking or drink-driving to shift. As argued by Nemeth (1986), minority influence is often only effective in the long term and usually works through secondary factors rather than directly changing behaviour. This challenges the impact of minority influence, suggesting it may not be as powerful or immediate force for social change as majority influence.
• A limitation is that deeper processing, a major part of social change, has been challenged. Moscovici's conversion theory suggests that minority influence causes people to think more deeply about an issue, which leads to internalisation and lasting change. However, Mackie (1987) disagrees, arguing that it is actually majority influence that prompts deeper processing because people are surprised when the majority holds a view different from their own. If this is true, then a central element of the process of minority influence may be incorrect, undermining the theory's explanatory power.
• A weakness is that there is contradictory evidence against the influence of minority groups in promoting social change. Bashir et al. (2013) found that people are often unwilling to associate with stereotyped minority groups, even if they agree with their views. For example, participants were less likely to support environmental causes because they didn’t want to be seen as “tree-huggers.” This suggests that negative perceptions of minority groups can be a barrier to their influence, reducing the likelihood that they will successfully bring about social change.
• Explain what is meant by social change (2)

  • whole societies
  • adopt new beliefs, attitudes or behaviours
  • through minority influence processes e.g. snowball effect
  • example: accepting the earth is round not flat, women’s suffragette movement etc.
• Informational Social Influence (ISI) can contribute to social change by:

  Providing new information that changes beliefs

  • ISI occurs when people conform because they believe others have more accurate information than they do, causing the majority to rethink their views

  Leading to internalisation:

  • When ISI takes place, people genuinely accept the new information as correct - leading to a long-term change.