social change

• use of normative social influence for social change


  we can use normative social influence to encourage others to do what the majority already do. This produces a normative pressure to fit in on a large scale.
• research support for normative social influence causing social change - Nolan


  gave condition 1 - a normative message of "most people trying to reduce energy usage" and gave condition 2 a message asking them "to reduce energy usage." those in condition 1 significantly reduced energy usage than those in condition 2.
• limitations of normative messages backfiring - the boomerang effect - Schultz et al

  normative message used - "most people use less than x amount of energy a day" heavy users did respond by reducing their usage, but light users did the opposite and used more, so it was not an exactly effective message.
• Deviant Effect - green campaigners stereotypes

  the minority may be seen as deviant from the 'norm' and so people may not want to align themselves with them.
• use of obedience for social change

  Milgram's study is an example of this. People are more likely to go along with a more extreme order if they have already gone along with less extreme orders.
• problems in Milgram and obedience to social change

  artificial task as no one will be asked to electrocute someone else. Demand characteristics may be likely, making the study less valid.
• use of Legitimacy of authority in social change

  those with more power are able to influence us more to change. For example the government during covid.
• problems in Asch's conformity to social change

  lacks participant diversity so was not representative of the population and hard to generalise. it was also an artificial task so not generalisable to real life.
• what are the six stages of social change due to minority influence?

  1) drawing attention2) consistency 3) deeper processing of the issue4) the augmentation principle5) the snowball effect6) social cryptomesia
• problems with Moscivici's minority influence to social change


  the task was artificial so could not be generalisable to real life situations.