Minority influence

• 2 conditions: 1) consistent: the two confederates called the slides green on all the trials. 2) inconsistent: two confederates called the slides, green, 24 times and blue 12 times.
• Moscovici (1969)= minority influence experiment
• Minority influence


  When a minority (small group) changes the attitudes, belief, behaviours of a majority
• Minority influence= when a minority (small group) changes the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of a majority>falls under social influence
• Factors that can enhance the selectiveness of a minority:

  • Consistency
  • Commitment
  • Flexibility
• Moscovici (1969) aimed to see if a consistent minority can influence a majority to give an incorrect answer in a colour perception task
• An experiment on colour perception was conducted with 172 female American participants
• Participants were asked to estimate the colour, out loud, of 36 slides (all different blue shades)
• Participants in the consistent condition were influenced by the minority as they called slides green on 8.4% of trials
• Participants in the inconsistent condition only called the slides green 1.5% of trials
• Deception was required in the experiment to get accurate/ valid results, as participants were told they were taking part in a colour perception test so they wouldn’t act a certain way
• moscovici had a bias sample, meaning it was unable to generalise the results>> further research is required (males)
• Deception was necessary to gather valid results in Moscovicis experiment