Minority Influence

• What is minority influence?


  A form of social influence in which a minority (sometimes only one person) persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours.
• What was Moscovici’s procedure?

  • 172 participants who were told they were taking part in a colour perception task
  • The participants were placed in groups of six and shown 36 slides, which were all varying shades of blue
  • The participant had to state out loud the colour of each slide
  • Two of the Six participants were confederates
• What was Condition 1 of Moscovici's procedure?


  (consistent) the two confederates said that all 36 slides were green.
• What was Condition 2 of Moscovici's procedure?


  (inconsistent) the confederates said that 24 of the slides were green and 12 were blue.
• What were Moscovici's findings?

  • Moscovici found that in the consistent condition, 32% of real participants gave same answer as minority at least one
  • In the inconsistent condition, the real participants only agreed on 1.25% of the trials
• What was the Control group of Moscovici's procedure?

  • no confederates - all participants had to do was state the colour of the slide.
  • they got it wrong in just 0.25% of the trials
• What is Synchronic Consistency?


  They (the majority) are all saying the same thing.
• What is Diachronic Consistency?


  They've been saying he same thing for a while now...

  • if the minority view is consistent people start to pay attention to it.
  • this makes people re-think their own views.
• What is Commitment in Minority Influence?

  • sometimes minorities engage in extreme activities to draw attention to their views.
  • their 'commitment to the cause' (this must be at some risk to the minority) convinces others to consider the minorities views.
  • this is called the Augmentation Principle.
• What is Flexibility in Minority Influence?

  • sometimes being extremely consistent can be seen as rigid, dogmatic and inflexible which is off-putting to the majority and they are therefore unlikely to change their opinion.
  • therefore the minority must be flexible (Nemeth 1986) and be ready to adapt and accept reasonable counter-arguments
  • there is a fine balance between consistency and flexibility.