AS P1 review

• Ethical limitations of asch's research

  • deception of participants. they believed confederates were genuine participants however, this is a small price to pay compared to the benefits gained from the study.
  • this way, participants could not have given fully informed consent as they did not know the true nature of the study
  • social pressure may have subject them to distress and anxiety. lack of protection from harm
• minority influence

  • when a minority changes the attitudes and behaviours of a majority through conversion

  conflict, understanding, persuasion (a form of internalisation)

  to strengthen MI

  consistency, commitment, flexibility (compromise)
• Social change happens when a minority changes society's opinions and a new social norm is created

  as more people convert, influence gets bigger

  the snowball effect
• Moscovici

  investigated minority influence

  study of doing an unambiguous task (judging slide colours)

  • asked to judge blue slides in the presence of a minority giving consistent, false answers
  • found that overall, participants agreed with the minority 8.2% of the time
  • shows that minorities can influence the attitudes of the majority when they are consistent
• Moscovici limitaitons

  • deception (participants did not know about the minority), meaning they did not know the true nature of the study and therefore could not give informed consent
  • low population validity and therefore lack of generalisability (all american female participants - gynocentric and ethnocentric bias - assumes application to other genders and cultures)
  • lack of ecological validity and mundane realism due to being a laboratory study
• Nemeth performed variations of Moscovici's study and found that people were more likely to agree with a flexible minority