social change

• Social change is where whole societies, rather than just individuals adopt new attitudes and beliefs
• An example of social change is the suffragette movement
• How a minority influence creates social change:

  • drawing attention
  • consistency
  • deeper processing
  • augmentation principle
  • snowball effect
  • social cryptomnesia
• protests draw attention to a cause or issue
• consistency can cause the majority to think about their views
• Deeper processing - this attention means majority start to think about the issues raised by the minority
• the augmentation principle - the majority value the importance of the cause as the minority are risking their lives for it
• Snowball effect - overtime more majority change their views and eventually the minority becomes the majority
• Social cryptomnesia - eventually people have a memory that change occurred but don’t remember how it happened
• Nolan et al (2008) investigated whether social influence processes led to a reduction in energy consumption in a community. They hung messages on the front doors of houses in San Diego saying that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. As a control, some residents had a different message that just asked them to save energy but did not reference other people’s behaviour. They found significant decreases in energy usage in the first group
• Nemeth (1986) argues that the effects of minority influence are likely to be mostly indirect and delayed
• the majority is influenced on matters only related to the issues at hand and not the central issue itself, and they are delayed because the effects may not be seen for some time
• the effects of minority influence on social change may be fragile and its role in social influence limited
• Mackie (1987) suggests majority views actually cause us to think more deeply about an issue rather than minority views, casting doubt on the role of deeper processing