Social change/minority influence

• Social change is when whole societies adopt new attitudes, beliefs or ways of doing things. Social change occurs as a result of social influence. Social influence is the process by which individuals and groups change each other's attitudes and behaviours. This includes conformity, obedience and minority influence. Therefore, social change can occur as a result of minorities or majorities, and obedience.
• One way social change occurs is through the role of minority influence, there are a lot of stages to this and the first step is :

  1. Drawing attention to an issue through social proof: e.g. marching, campaigning etc. In the 1950's in America, black separation applied to all parts of America. There were black neighbourhoods and, in the southern states of America, places such as schools and restaurants were exclusive to whites. The civil rights marches of this period drew attention to the situation by providing social proof of the problem.
• The second step in how minority influence creates social change is:

  • Consistency and flexibility: where they must keep the message over time but be willing to compromise so as to not appear dogmatic. There were many marches and many people taking part. Even though they were a minority of the American population, the civil rights activists displayed consistency of message and intent.
• The third step in how minority influence creates social change is:

  • Deeper processing of the issue: where the majority experience cognitive conflict- they have two conflicting ideas about the issue (theirs and the minority's) that the are motivated to resolve. Therefore, they think more deeply about the minority influence.
• The third and fourth step in how minority influence creates social change is:

  • Deeper processing of the issue: where the majority experience cognitive conflict- they have two conflicting ideas about the issue (theirs and the minority) that they are motivated to resolve. Therefore, they think more deeply about the minority influence. This is known as the augmentation principle where the minority demonstrates commitment through sacrificing something e.g. freedom, reputation, their own properly.
• Augmentation principle: There were a number of incidents where individuals risked their lives. For example, the 'freedom riders' were mixed racial groups who got on buses in the south to challenge the fact that black people still had to sit separately on buses. Many freedom riders were beaten and there were incidents of mob violence. The film Mississippi Burning portrays the murder of three civil rights campaigners.
• The fifth step in how minority influence creates social change is:

  • The snowball effect: where more and more people become persuaded by the message until social change occurs. For example, civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King continued to press for changes that gradually got the attention of the US government. In 1964, the US Civil Rights Act was passed, which prohibited discrimination. This represented a change from minority to majority support for civil rights.
• The last step in how minority influence creates social change:

  • Over time social cryptomnesia (conformity/obedience) will develop, which is where people have a memory that change has occurred but not how it happened. People conform to the new majority position/ if a new law is put in place they obey the new law. So social change happens.
• Difference between majority and minority influence:

  • majority- people identify with the majority and try to fit in
  • minority- creates a conversion process whereby provided the minority adopt a consistent and committed approach
• Majority is linked to internalisation.
• Limitation: Social change through minority influence happens slowly when they do happen. E.g. it has taken decades for attitudes towards smoking to shift. Nemeth (1986) argues that the effects of minority influence are likely to be indirect because the majority is influenced only on matters related to a current issue, and not central to the issue itself and delayed because the effects take a while to manifest. This undermines the role of minority influence in social change as it suggests that the effects are fragile and so minority change is very limited and so a weak part in social change.
• Weakness:draw heavily on Milgram's, Asch's and Moscovici et al's study, which have many limitations as some use artificial tasks. E.g., in Asch's study demand characteristics may have played a role in that ppts would have guessed that the Confederates were not true ppts due to the repeated trials and so may have conformed more than they would in real situations. We cannot be confident that these explanations play a valid role in social change as the research used to derive them suffers from many weaknesses and so we cannot strongly support the role of these explanations of social change.
• Strength:There's research support. Nolan (2008) investigated whether social influence processes led to a reduction in energy consumption in a community. They hung messages on front doors of houses in California every week for one month. The key message was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. As a control, some residents had a different message that asked them to save energy but didn't say what other people did. They found significant decreases in energy in the first group. Suggests that conformity can lead to social change through NSI and so the theory is valid.
• Weakness: The role of deeper processing. Moscovici argues that minority and majority influence involve different cog processes. E.g. minority influence causes individuals to think more deeply about an issue than majority influence. This may not be the case. Researchers have found evidence that majorities cause deeper processing. This is because we like to believe that others share and think in the same way as us. When we find that a majority believes something different we are forced to think deeply about their thoughts and arguments.
• Continuing the role of the deeper processing weakness:

  • Therefore a central element of the process of minority influence has been challenged and may be wrong. So the explanation of social change may not be entirely valid