Social Influence and Social Change

• Lessons from conformity research 1/4

  • Asch highlighted the need for dissent in a variation in which one confederate gave correct answers throughout the procedure. This broke the power of the majority, encouraging others to do the same. Such dissent has the potential to ultimately lead to social change.
• Lessons from conformity research 2/4

  • Another approach used by environmental & health campaigns which exploit conformity processes by appealing to normative social influence. They do this by providing information about what others are doing. Social change is actually encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are doing.
• Lessons from conformity research 3/4

  • Milgram's research clearly demonstrates the importance of disobedient role models. In the variation where a confederate teacher refuses to give shocks to the learner, the rate of obedience in participants plummeted.
• Lessons from conformity research 4/4

  • Zimbardo suggested how obedience can be used to create social change through the process of gradual commitment. Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes increasingly difficult to disobey a bigger one. People drift into a new kind of behaviour.
• Process 1/2

  • Drawing attention - civil rights marches drew attention to the situation, providing social proof of segregation.
  • Consistency - civil rights activists represented a minority but their position remained consistent. Millions of people took part in many marches over several years, presenting the same messages.
  • Deeper processing - the activism meant that many people who just accepted the status quo began to think deeply about the unjustness of it.
• Process 2/2

  • The augmentation principle- individuals risked their life multiple times -personal risk indicates a strong belief and reinforces their message.
  • The snowball effect - activists gradually got the attention of the government and more and more people backed the minority view, making a change from minority to majority support for civil rights.
  • social cryptoamnesia - people have a memory that change occurred but don't remember the events leading up to it.