AO3

• A strength is that

  -research has shown that social influence processes based on psychological research do work

  -Nolan et al aimed to see if they could change people's energy use habits
• researchers hung messages on doors in California every week for a month.

  -The key message was that most residents are trying to reduce their energy usage.

  -They found that those who saw the normative message displayed a significant decrease in their energy usage compared to a control who saw a message that made no reference to other people’s behaviour.
• This shows that

  -This shows that conformity (majority influence) can lead to social change through the operation of normative social influence and as such is a valid explanation.
• A weakness is methodological issues seen in research into social change.

  -Explanations of how social influence leads to social change draw heavily upon the studies of Moscovici, Asch and Milgram

  -In each of these studies, the tasks are trivial and do not reflect real-life situations of social influence. Their samples are made up entirely of students/males/females and are ungeneralisable to the population.
• These flaws mean

  -that the explanations based on them are limited in what they can tell us about social change.
• One weakness of social norms interventions is that they have had a varied influence on social change.

  -Foxcroft et al. (2015) reviewed social norms interventions including 70 studies where the social norms approaches were used to reduce student alcohol use.

  -The researchers found only a small reduction in drinking quantity and no effect on drinking frequency.

  -This suggests that using normative influence does not always produce long-term social change.
• One weakness is that social change through minority influence may be very gradual.

  -History shows how minorities such as the suffragettes failed to bring about social change quickly.

  -There is a strong tendency for human beings to conform to the majority position, and as such groups are more likely to maintain the status quo rather than engage in social change.
• Therefore..

  -the influence of a minority is perhaps more latent than direct (i.e., it creates the potential for change rather than actual social change).
• A strength is that

  -Bashir et al found that participants were less likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways because they did not want to be associated with stereotypical and minority ‘environmentalists’

  -They described environmental activists in negative ways (e.g., ‘tree-huggers’)
• This supports the role of

  -flexibility in minority influence as If the majority (who hold the power) find the minority too off-putting, they will never be in a position to consider its message.