Minority influence

• Minority influence is when a majority is persuaded to accept the beliefs or behaviour of a minority.
• Minority influence normally leads to internalisation
• There are three processes in minority influence: Consistency, Flexibility and commitment.
• Consistency: Minorities who are consistent in their views cause the majority to rethink their own views.
• There are Two types of consistency: Synchronic Consistency and Diachronic Consistency.
• Synchronic consistency is when the beliefs of the individuals in the group are consistent with each other
• Diachronic consistency is consistency over time
• Flexibility: The minority that can adapt its message to fit new situations will be more successful than one which cannot.
• Commitment: A minority that shows high levels of commitment towards their viewpoint will have greater success at changing others' opinions.
• Commitment can involve acts of extremism of risk of personal harm
• If a minority is not flexible, they would not adapt to and be willing o listen to the majority's views so would come off in a negative light.
• The Snowball Effect is when some members of the majority begin to think more deeply about the beliefs of the minority. This causes Conversion, which makes more people from the majority think more deeply about the beliefs of the minority
• Change occurs when the minority view becomes the majority view through the Snowball Effect
• Moscovici et al's Blue slide - Green slide study: 172 women in groups of 6 were asked to guess the colour of 36 blue slides. The blue varied in intensity and they were asked to guess if it was blue or green. There were 2 confederates in each group who consistently said Green. The majority agreed on 8.4% of the trials. This demonstrates the effect of consistency because when the minority was inconsistent in their answer, the agreement fell to 1.25%.
• A weakness of Moscovici's study is that he used a biased sample of 172 American women. This creates a gender bias and a culture bias. This means that it lacks external validity because it cannot be applied to males or other cultures.