Minority influence

• Research suggests that if a minority are going to try and influence the views and beliefs of the majority they need to be : Consistent
• Research by Moscovici suggested that the minority must be consistent with their message if they wanted to change the views and behaviour of the majority
• Moscovici (1)= females in groups of 6 were asked to name the colour of 36 slides all with various ‘greenish’ shades of blue, but were still clearly blue
• Moscovici (2)= Two of the 6 were confederates. Moscovici found that 4 naive participants named the slides as ‘green’ on 8% of the trials when both confederates answered green on every trial.
• moscovici(3) However, they only answered green on 1.25% of the trials when the confederates were inconsistent with their answers.
• Moscovici (4)- This suggests that a minority can influence the behaviour of the majority , but only if they are consistent with their viewpoint.
• Flexibility Research by Nemeth et al suggests that the minority must be flexible in order to change the views and behaviour of the majority.
• Nemeth et al (1)- Nemeth et al repeated Moscovici’s experiment but gave participants the option to say ‘green-blue’ rather than just green.
• Nameth et al (2)- They found that when confederates always answered green it had no effect on the participants' answers.
• Nameth et al (3)= However,when confederates answered ‘green-blue’ the participants were more likely to conform. This suggests that the minority is more likely to get the majority to conform to its viewpoint (behaviour) if they are flexible
• Commitment Research suggests that when people show commitment to a viewpoint they are much more likely to influence others.
• Commitment- The augmentation principle suggests that if people are willing to make sacrifices in order to maintain their minority point of view then they are more likely to change the views of the majority