social change

• Social change is when a whole society adopts a new belief or way of believing that then becomes widely accepted as the norm

  An example of social change is attitudes towards homosexuality. Although it was an illegal offence in the uk until 1967, public attitudes have changed over time and most people now regard it as the norm.
• The steps involved

  Drawing attention, consistency, deeper processing, The augmentation principle, the snow ball effect and social cryptomnesia.
• drawing attention= minority draw attention to an issue
• Consistency= persistently repeating and presenting the same view over a long period of time
• Deeper processing= involves cognitive conflict. The minority creates a conflict between what the majority currently believe and the position of the minority.
• The augmentation principle= when a minority appears willing to suffer for their views they are taken more seriously by others.
• The snowball effect= small at first but this then spreads until it reaches a tipping point at which stage it leads to wide scale social change.
• Social cryptomnesia= people have a memory that changed happen but do not remember how.
• One strength is that research has shown that social influence processes based on psychological research do work. Nolan et al aimed to see if they could change peoples energy use habits by hanging messages on the doors of houses every week for a month. The key message was that residents are trying to reduce energy usage while the control made no reference to other residents. There were significant decreases in energy with the first group compared to the second. This shows that conformity can lead to social change through the operation of NSi, it is a valid explanation.
• another strength is that psychologists can explain how minority influence brings about social change. Nemeth, claims that it is due to the type of thinking that minorities inspire. When people consider minoritys arguments they engage in divergent thinking, which is more broad and they have to actively search for information and weigh up more options. This leads to better decision making and more creative solutions regarding social issues, minorities help stimulate new ideas in a way the majority cannot.
• one limitation — Mackie suggests that the role of minority influence is very limited because we are more likely to change our own views if the majority view is different to our own. This is because we often take comfort knowing that so many other people also share our view that when they don’t, we become unsettled and are forced to deeply process this change