Minority Influence

• What is minority influence?

  How one person or a small group influence beliefs of others behaviour
• What does minority influence lead to?

  Internalisation of beliefs
• What are the three processes of minority influence?

  • Consistency
  • Commitment
  • Flexibility
• What is consistency?

  Always doing the same thing, the minorities view gains interest and makes others rethink their own views
• What is synchronic consistency?

  People in the minority are all saying the same thing
• What is diachronic consistency?

  People in minority saying the same thing for some time
• What is commitment?

  • Showing deep involvement and gaining attention through extreme activities
  • The activities must create some Risk to minority to demonstrate commitment
• What is the augmentation principle?

  When the majority pay even more attention as they see the commitment
• What is flexibility?

  • The minority balance consistency and flexibility so they don’t appear rigid.
  • Nemeth argued that being consistent is off putting so they should be flexible and accept reasonable counter arguments
• What is the snowball effect?

  Over Time, more people become “converted” and switch from the majority to the minority, the more it happens the faster the rate of conversion. Then social change occurs
• How did Moscovici eat al study minority influence?

  • Investigated the effects of a consistent minority on a majority.
  • Groups of 4 participants and 2 confederates with 36 slides, clearly blue or green and asked to state the colour.
• What were the results of Moscovici et als experiment?

  • Condition 1 - confederates consistently said green = 8.42% gave same wrong answer
  • Condition 2 - inconsistent confederates =1.25% conformed
  • Condition 3 - control group = 0.25% wrongly identified colour
• Strength of Minority Influence:?

  • Research support for consistency
  • Moscovici's blue-green slides and wood et als meta analysis
• Strength of Minority Influence:?

  • Research support for deeper processing
  • Ps exposed to minority view resisted conflicting view (Martin et al)

  COUNTERPOINT:

  • Real world majorities have more power/status than minorities, missing from research
• Limitation of Minority Influence:

  • Artificial tasks in experiments
  • Tasks often trivial so tell us little about real world influence
• Strength of Minority Influence:

  • Power of minority influence
  • More people agree with minority in private