Minority influence

    Cards (12)

    • minority influence: situations where one person or a small group influences the beliefs and behaviour of others (majority).
    • consistency: when a minority repeatedly defends and advocates for their position over time. this shows stability in the position and agreement among members of the minority.
    • Commitment: the degree to which members of a majority are dedicated to a cause. This includes partaking in an extreme act to show commitment, the greater the personal sacrifice, the greater the influence had.
    • Flexibility: A willingness to be flexible and compromise when expressing a position. Minorities must show they can be reasonable so the majority accepts their position.
    • The snowball effect in social influence: when a minority applies the factors, their group gradually increases in size, growing in significance until there is a powerful outcome and an impact is made.
    • how does social influence lead to social change?
      Moscovici states that if an individual is exposed to a persuasive argument from a minority, they may change their views to coincide with the minority group. This process is called ‘conversion‘ and is a necessary prequisite for social change.
    • Moscovici’s experiment procedure: female, lab study, four ppts and two confederates. They were shown slides and asked to judge whether the slide was green or blue. Inconsistent and consistent experiments where the minority either answered green consistently or varied their answers Throughout.
    • Social cryptoamnesia: a failure to recall the origin of social change but know that a change has occurred.
    • Moscovici’s experiment results: the consistent minority group caused the majority to say green on over 8% of the trials, whereas the inconsistent minority group did not exact much influence, so only around 2% answered green.
    • Limitation of Moscovici’s experiment - gender bias
      -Moscovici uses an all female sample, and attempts to generalise the findings to men also.
      -Shows clear example of beta bias and androcentrism as results attempt to use female behaviour as a basis for judging male minority influence as well.
      -Hence results are not generalisable to wider population.
    • Limitation of Moscovici’s experiment - general poor results.
      -A consistent minority was only able to influence naive participants to say ‘green‘ on 8% of trials, a very low result.
      -Furthermore the task used may be ambiguous, ppts may have only answered ’green’ if the colour was ambiguous, not because of the consistent minority.
      -Hence the study is vulnerable to external factors, so it has low internal validity.
    • strength of Moscovici’s study - Difference between control
      -Despite low results (8% over all trials), there is a significant impact of having an inconsistent compared to a consistent minority.
      -Inconsistent minority groups were closer to the control group in terms of majority influence (where minority also gave the correct answer throughout).
      -Hence there is evidence for the effect of minority on influencing the majority.