AO1
Cards (5)
- Social change
- When societies as a whole adopt new attitudes, beliefs and behaviours
- Continual at a gradual pace
- Minority influence is the main driving force for social change
- Stages of social change - minority influence
- drawing attention to the issue
- Cognitive conflict - minority creates a conflict between the majority views and their views. If the minority is credible it forces a deeper conflict
- Consistency of postion.
- The augmentation principle - minorities willing to sacrifice for their cause are taken seriously
- Snowball effect - minority influence spreads more widely until it reaches a tipping point which leads to widescale social change
- Social cryptomnesia - Social change came about but some people have no memory of events leading to that change
- example of the stages of social change: suffragettes
- drawing attention - hunger strikes, violence and grand spectacles
- cognitive conflict - encouraged equality
- consistency of position - consistent regardless of the attitudes and hostility around them
- augmentation principle - risked imprisonment
- snowball effect - was finally given the vote
- conformity research
- dissenters make social change more likely - Aschs line test dissenters with a different answer to the group broke the power of the majority - demonstrates potential to change
- normative social influence os a powerful tool in informing people about what others are doing - by appealing to normative social influence, campaigns can use this. By providing info on what others are doing can draw attention and make them think deeply
- obedience research
- disobedient models make change more likely - milgrams variation where a confederate with the ppt refused to give a shock - conformity went from 65% to 10% - demonstrates potential for social change
- Zimbardo argues gradual commitment leads to drift. Once a small instruction is observed it becomes more difficult to resist a bigger one. People drift into a new kind of behaviour