Social influence and social change

• The steps involved in a minority influence creating a social change

  1. Drawing attention- through social proof
  2. Consistency- message and position has to remain constant
  3. Deeper processing- people begin to deeply think about the issue
  4. Augmentation principle- personal risk indicates a strong belief and reinforces their message
  5. Snowball affect- more and more people pay attention
  6. Social cryptomnesia- social change has occurred but no one recalls it happening 
• Social change occurs when a whole society is rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs, and ways of doing things
• strength is that psychologist can explain how minority influence brings about social change

  Social change is due to the type of thinking that minorities inspire

  when people consider minority arguments, they engage in divergent thinking

  This type of thinking is broad, rather than narrow, and the thinker actively searches for information and weighs up more options
• A limitation is that deeper processing may not play a role in how minorities bring about social change

  People are supposedly converted because they think more deeply about the minorities views

  some psychologists disagree and present evidence that it is majority influence that may create deeper processing if you do not share their views

  This is because we like to believe that other people share our views and think the same way as us. When we find that a majority believes something different, we are forced to think about their arguments and reasoning.
• strength is that social influence processes based on psychological research do work

  Nolan aimed to see if they could change people's energy-use habits.

  Messages were hung on the front doors of houses every week for a month. It said most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. Some residents had a message that just asked them to save energy as control.

  There were decreases in energy usage

  This shows that conformity (majority influence) can lead to social change through the operation of normative social influence, i.e. it is a valid explanation.
• conformity

  in the conformity research, when a confederate gave correct answer it break the power of the majority, encouraging others to do the same.

  dissent has the potential to lead to social change
• normative social influence

  By providing information about what other people are doing, you can create social change by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing

  People will follow because they want to fit in