minority influence

• Minority influence is a form of social influence where member of a majority group change their beliefs through exposure to a persuasive smaller group/minority  
• to have an impact minority influence needs to be

  • flexible
  • committed
  • consistent
• Consistency is...

  • Stability in the expressed position over time and agreement over different members of the minority.
  • When exposed to a different minority view people initially see it as an error but consistency makes them re consider more carefully when seen to be sufficiently confident to maintain their view.
  • Nemeth and wood carried out a meta analysis of 97 and found those who were consistent were particularly influential. 
• Commitment

  • The degree to which members of a minority are dedicated to particular cause or activity.
  • The greater the perceived commitment, the greater the influence,
  • suggests certainty confidence and courage in the face of a hostile majority, which then persuades the majority to take them more seriously or convert.
• Flexibility 

  • Willingness to compromise when expressing a position, and being open to others ideas or beliefs.
  • Mugny suggests this is more effective. Because minorities are typically powerless they need to negotiate their position rather than enforcing it.
  • Degree of flexibility -not perceived as dogmatic or inconsistent.
• • Moscvici carried out an experiment where 4 naive partcipantbs and two confederates. (minority)
  • shown blue slides and asked to judge the colour of them,
  • in the consistent condition the confederates answered green to every one
  • inconsistent they only answered green ⅔ .
  • control condition where they all answered blue every time
• movsci findings

  .They found that in the consistent the minority influenced the majority to say green for over 8% trials

  whereas the inconsiset wasnt much different from teh control condition showing a consistent approach is the most effective
• potential for minorities influence often limited by being perceived as deviant in the eyes of the majority

  • meta analysis- wood Many stop aligning with position to avoid seen as deviant due to normative pressures society
  • means message have very little impact -focus is on the source of the message (the deviant minority) rather than the message itself
  • challenging to acquire people to embrace their position. (regardless of techniques used)
  • However communist manifesto emphasised that the minority had no interest separate from those of the majority which helped to overcome the problem of being perceived as deviant.
• Mackie - majority create greater message processing as when exposed to a different message we have to carefully consider why this is the case to understand it more deeply

  not something people automaticallyspend time on.

  found that there is a  Strong tendency for humans to conform to the majority and we are more likely to maintain the status quo rather than engage in social change therefore the change is frequently more latent than direct change if any will be very slow due to many people choosing not to process the minorities’s message, may not be noticeable enough to create an impact.
• A strength of minority influence is that there hyas been Research support into these factors which make minorities have more of an influenced. For example nemeth and studied the effect of flexibility in a stimulated jury situation where group member discussed amount of compensation for someone in a ski loft accident when a confederate put forward his pov and refused to change it had no efefct however one who compromised and showed some degree of shift later on (being flexible) did exert influence.Therefore showing being flexible helps you to exert the greatest influence on the majority.