Minority influence

• Minority influence is where a minority, influence others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours. Leads to internalisation or conversion, in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviours, end goal is internalisation.
• Consistency in minority influence is most effective if the minority keeps same beliefs, both over time and between all individuals that form minority. Brings attention to minority view so is effective.
• Synchronic consistency is when they're all saying the same thing and

  diachronic consistency is when they've been saying the same thing for a long period of time
• The minority has to show full commitment to their views and show this through their actions, which can be extreme in some cases
• The first step of conversion is conflict, which people take notice of. Second, people try to understand the minority, and third the majority are persuaded by the validity of the minority's attitudes. If the he majority are persuaded, then we can say conversion is a type of internalisation.
• There are three ways that a minority can strengthen their influence on a minority. First, minorities can show consistency by having attitudes that are constant over time, and that everyone in the group shares. Second, minorities can show commitment by caring strongly enough about their attitudes to risk punishment. Finally minorities can show flexibility by listening and understanding other viewpoints and being willing to compromise.
• Social change is when minorities change attitudes and behaviours of a society so that new social norms are created. Minorities create social change by converting people to their position and as more people convert, influence of the minority gets bigger causing people to convert at a faster rate until the minority becomes the majority, this is called the snowball effect.
• social cryptomnesia is when people forget how the new social norms were adopted and who they came from.
• Moscovici investigated whether a minority could influence attitudes of a majority in a task where the answer was clear. He used 172 female participants. Participants were asked to judge the colour of blue slides, where a minority gave the wrong answer in a consistent and inconsistent condition.
• When the minority (confederates) were consistent, people agreed with the minority 8.2% of the time, whereas in the inconsistent condition, the real participants only agreed on 1.25% of the trials, concluding that, although there was no huge findings, minorities can influence attitudes of the majority when they are consistent.
• Moscovici's study lacked generalisability due to low population validity. Moscovici used a bias sample of 172 female participants from America. As a result, we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, for example male participants, and we cannot conclude that male participants would respond to minority influence in the same way. It also lacked ecological validity because it was a lab experiment, so unable to capture actual minorities commitment It may have been unethical because it was a deception which may have caused stress.