Minority Influence

• What is minority influence?

  how one person or a small group influence beliefs of others behaviour
• What does minority influence lead to?

  internalisation of beliefs
• What are the three processes of minority influence?

  consistency, commitment and flexibility
• What is consistency?

  always doing the same thing, the minorities view gains interest and makes others rethink their own views
• what is synchronic consistency?

  people in the minority are all saying the same thing
• what is diachronic consistency?

  people in minority saying the same thing for some time
• what is commitment?

  showing deep involvement and gaining attention through extreme activities, the activities must create some Risk to minority to demonstrate commitment
• what is the augmentation principle?

  when the majority pay even more attention as they see the commitment
• what is flexibility?

  the minority balance consistency and flexibility sio they don’t appear rigid. Nemeth argued that being consistent is off putting so they should be flexible and accept reasonable counter arguments
• What is the snowball effect?

  over Time, more people become “converted” and switch from the minority to the majority, the more it happens the faster the rate of conversion. Then social change occurs
• How did Moscovici eat al study minority influence?

  investigated the effects of a consistent minority on a majority.

  groups of 4 participants and 2 confederates with 36 slides, clearly blue or green and asked to state the colour.
• what were the results of Moscovici et als experiment?

  Condition 1 - confederates consistently said green = 8.42% gave same wrong answer

  Condition 2 - inconsistent confederates =1.25% conformed

  Condition 3 - control group = 0.25% wrongly identified colour
• limitation of Moscovici

  research involved artificial tasks, very different to how minority influence actually takes place
• strength of minority infulence

  research support for consistency - Wood conducted meta analysis which showed minorities that were consistent were most influential