Social Change

• How does minority influence explain social change in 1950s/60s America?

  1. Civil rights marches drew attention to the black and white segregation across the country

  2. Many marches took place over several years, presenting the same non-aggressive messages

  3. People started to deeply process the status quo they had accepted as normal before

  4. The augmentation principle - many freedom riders were beaten for challenging social segregation on public transport

  5. Snowball effect- activists such MLK bought the attention of the US government and the 1964 act prohibited discrimination, marking the change of minority to majority

  6. Social cryptomnesia- some people have no memory of the events that lead to this change
• Lessons from conformity research?


  In asch’s dissenting participant variation, we were shown how one person can break the power of the majority and encourage others to do the same. This has the potential to lead to social change

  Or social change can occur through Normative Social Influence as environmentalists and health campaigns exploit its use. For example printing normative messages about what others do ‘bin it - others do’
• Lessons from obedience research: Milgram’s study clearly outlines the importance of disobedient models. once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes harder to disobey a bigger one. So people ’drift’ into a new kind of behaviour according to Zimbardo. So it’s important to have someone disobedient since it helps stop this drift (proof: when there was a disobedient confederate in Milgram’s, obedience plummeted)