Minority influence

• Minority influence: a minority of people persuades others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours, leads to internalisation.

  • > different from conformity where majority does the influencing (majority influence)
• Miscovicis ‘blue slide, green slide’ study:

  > Procedure: 

  • A group of 6 (2 confederates) viewed 36 different blue-coloured slides, then were asked to state whether they were blue or green
  • 1 condition: both confederates consistently said green
  • 2 condition: both confederates were inconsistent
  • The procedure was repeated with a control group (no confederates)
• Miscovicis ‘blue slide, green slide’ study:

  > Findings:

  • Consistent minority: participants gave the same wrong answer on 8.42% of trials
  • Inconsistent minority: agreement fell to 1.25%
  • Control group: wrongly identified colour just 0.25% of the time
• Miscovicis ‘blue slide, green slide’ study drew attention to 3 main processes in a minority influence:

  • Consistency
  • Commitment
  • Flexibility
• Consistency: minorities must be consistent in their views, in order to make others rethink their own views.
• Synchronic consistency: people in the minority are all saying the same thing
• Diachronic consistency: they’ve been saying the same thing for some time
• Commitment: minority must demonstrate commitment to their cause or view to gain attention (augmentation = majority may even more attention)
• Flexibility: the minority should be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counter arguments to not appear rigid
• Hearing about something new makes individuals think deeply about the minority position because it’s unfamiliar.
• The snowball effect: over time more and more people become ‘converted’, they switch from minority to the majority.
• Strength of consistency: research evidence demonstrating the importance of consistency, e.g. Moscovicis ‘blue slide, green slide’ study. Confirms that consistency is a major factor in minority influence
• Strength of minority influence: evidence showing that a change in the majority’s position does involve deeper processing of the minority’s ideas. Martin gave participants a message supporting a particular viewpoint, and measured participants’ agreement. One group heard a minority group agree and the other heard a majority group agree. Participants were less willing to change their opinions to the new conflicting view if they had listened to the minority group than if they listened to a majority group.
• Limitation of minority influence: minority influence research often involves artificial tasks. Research is therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life, e.g. jury decision making.