Social Influence Processes in Social Change

• What is social influence?

  Social influence refers to the process by which individuals or groups change each other's attitudes and behaviours. Includes conformity, obedience and minority influence.
• What is social change?

  Occurs when whole societies, rather than just individuals adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things. E.g. accepting that the Earth orbits the Sun, women's suffrage, gay rights and environmental issues.
• What are the 6 stages of the social change process (the special roles of minority influence?)

  1. Drawing attention through social proof
  2. Consistency
  3. Deeper processing of the issue
  4. The augmentation principle
  5. The snowball effect
  6. Social cryptomnesia (people have a memory that change has occurred but don't remember how it happened)
• What is 1. Drawing attention through social proof?

  • In the 1950s America, black separation applied to all parts of America
  • There were black neighbourhoods and, in the Southern states of America, places such as schools and restaurants were exclusive to whites
  • The civil rights marches of this period drew attention to the situation by providing social proof of the problem
• What is 4. The augmentation principle?

  • There were a number of incidents where individuals risked their lives
  • For example the 'freedom riders' were mixed racial groups who got on buses in the south to challenge the fact that black people still had to sit separately on buses
  • Many freedom riders were beaten and there were incidents of mob violence
  • The film Mississippi Burning portrays the murder of three civil rights campaigners
• What is 5. The snowball effect?

  • Civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King continued to press for charges that gradually got the attention of the US government
  • In 1964 the US Civil Rights Act was passed, which prohibited discrimination
  • This represented a change from minority to majority support for civil rights
• What is 6. Social cryptomnesia (people have a memory that social change has occurred but don't remember how it happened)?

  • There is no doubt that social change did come about and the south is quite a different place now but some people have no memory of the events above that led to that change
• What are social norm interventions?

  • Provides information about what other people are doing
  • Asch showed the importance of dissent in one of his variations, in which one confederate gave correct answers throughout the procedure
  • This broke the power of the majority encouraging others to dissent. Such dissent has the potential to lead to social change
• How do social norm interventions build on the concept of normative social influence?

  • Environmental and health campaigns increasingly exploit conformity processes by appealing to normative social influence
  • They do this by providing information about what other people are doing, e.g. reducing litter by printing normative messages on litter bins ('Bin it - others do'), and preventing young people from taking up smoking (telling them that most other young people do not smoke)
  • In other words social change is encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority is actually doing
• What is 2. Consistency?

  • There were many marches and many people taking part. Even though they were a minority of the American population, the civil rights activists displayed consistency of message and intent
• What is 3. Deeper processing of the issue?

  • This attention meant that many people who had simply accepted the status quo began to think about the unjustness of it