minority influence

• What is minority influence?

  • When a minority changes the attitudes and behaviours of the majority through a process called conversion.
• What are the 3 stages of conversion?

  1. Minority creates conflict and people take notice.
  2. People try to understand the minority's position.
  3. The majority are persuaded by the validity of the minority's attitudes.
• Since the majority are persuaded that the minority are correct (last stage of conversion), we can say that conversion is a form of what type of conformity?

  Internalisation
• What are the 3 ways a minority can strengthen their influence on the majority?

  1. Minorities can show consistency - by having attitudes that are constant over time and context, and that everyone in the group holds.
  2. Minorities can show commitment - by caring strongly enough about their attitudes to risk punishment and disapproval (e.g. imprisonment).
  3. Minorities can show flexibility - by listening to and understanding other people's points of view and being willing to compromise.
• What is social change and what effect can it lead to?

  • When minorities change the attitudes and behaviour of a society so that new social norms are created.
  • Minorities create social change through slowly converting people to their position.
  • As more people convert, the influence of the minority gets bigger, causing people to convert at a faster rate, until the minority becomes the majority.
  • This is known as the snowball effect.
• What is social cryptoamnesia?


  • The effect whereby people forget how the new social norms were adopted and who they came from.
  • E.g. normalisation of homosexuality.
• Describe Moscovici's study.

  • Moscovici investigated whether a minority could influence the attitudes of a majority in an unambiguous task (where the answer was clear).
  • Ppts were asked to judge the colour of blue slides in the presence of a minority who gave the wrong answer (that the blue slides were green) in a consistent and inconsistent condition.
  • Moscovici found that when the minority was consistent that the blue slides were green, people agreed with the minority 8.2% of the time.
  • Moscovici concluded that minorities can influence attitudes of the majority when they are consistent.
• Nemeth conducted additional variations on Moscovici's experiment and found what?

  • Nemeth found people were more likely to agree with a flexible minority than an inflexible minority.
• A03: What are 3 limitations of Moscovici's study?

  • Lacked generalisability due to low population validity (sample consisted of 172 female participants from America).
  • Laboratory experiment = lacked ecological validity.
  • Unethical - used deception which might have caused stress.