social influence

• Social Group


  group of 2+ people who who interact together, share things in common, and share a common identity.
• Social Roles


  a behaviour of beliefs expected of a person with a particular position in a social group
• private attitude 


  genuine beliefs or feelings
• public attitude 


  what they tell other people what they believe or feel
• Resistance to Social Influence


  someone reciting direct orders from person of authority e.g. edelweiss pirates residing nazi's.

  resisting to majority
• social support


  situational explanation for why people resist social influence.

  has to be more than one person agreeing with you
• locus of control


  amount of control someone has of events in their own life

  internal locus of control: more likely to resist social influence

  external locus of control: don't think they have control in their lives
• evidence of locus of control

  • personality questionnaire developed by rotter
  • Shute found evidence to support Locus of Control on resistance to social influence
  • made people fill in Rotters questionnaire and see how much peoples attitudes can be affected by social influence
  • FINDINGS: people with internal locus of control do not conform to social influence if normative information
• process by which minorities influence a majority is called...

  conversion
• process of conversion

  1. CONFLICT: minority creates conflict and people take notice.
  2. UNDERSTANDING: people try and understand the minority’s position.
  3. VALIDITY: majority are persuaded by the validity minority’s attitudes.

  Conversion is a form of internalisation.
• strengthening minority influence

  1. consistency: when everyone in the minority repeatedly holds the same attitude.
  2. flexibility: where the minority compromises with the majority
  3. commitment: where the minority demonstrate how important the cause is to them
• process of social Social Change


  minorities change the attitudes and behaviours of a society, so that new social norms are created.

  slowly converting a few people

  then more and more people convert at a faster rate = snowball effect
• social cyptomnesia 


  people forget how new social norms were adopted, and who they came from.
• The Moscovici Experiment

  AIM-

  see if minority could influence a majority in an unambiguous task where answer was clear

  PROCEDURE-

  192 females into 6 groups (two confederates per group)

  judged the slides colour which were blue, confederates said green

  RESULTS-

  consistant confederates = 8.2% influence

  inconsistent confederates = 1.5%

  CONCLUSION-

  minority influence more powerful than expected
• The Moscovici Experiment: Evaluation

  • low population validity (lack of generalisability)
  • lack of ecological validity (laboratory experiment)
  • unethical: deception (might have caused stress)
• Nemeth's Experiment on Flexibility


  Nemeth performed additional variations of  moscovici ’s experiment and found that people were more likely to agree with a flexible   minority.