Research into role of SI processes in social change

• What is Social change?

  • Social change refers to the adoption of new beliefs or behaviors by a society.

  • It's often linked to large-scale movements like suffragettes.

  • It can also refer to widespread societal changes like healthier eating.

  • Research on social influence provides insights into the process of social change.
• Influence of Minorities on Social Change

  • Persuasive minorities like suffragettes and Green movement can significantly influence social change.

  • Their power lies in their ability to organize, educate, and mobilize support for their cause.
• How does minority influence occur?

  The four stage process of minority influence ‘conversion’

  1. Attention

  The start of this conversion process begins with the minority drawing the majority’s attention to a particular issue. For example, in the UK, the suffragettes drew attention to their cause through posters and hunger strikes. 
• The four stage process of minority influence ‘conversion’

  2. Cognitive Conflict

  By drawing our attention to an issue, the minority creates a conflict between what the majority of group members currently accept to be true and an alternative position being offered by the minority. As a result of this conflict, group members try to understand why the minority is going against the majority position. 
• The four stage process of minority influence ‘conversion’

  3. Consistency

  Research on minority influence has established that minorities are more successful in bringing about social change when they express their position consistently as their position is taken more seriously.
• 4 stage process

  The augmentation principle suggests that minorities who challenge the majority norm often suffer for their views, potentially leading to mockery, imprisonment, or even death. This willingness to suffer strengthens the impact of their position, as if there are costs or risks involved, others are more likely to be influenced by it.
• 5. Snowball effect

  The gradual process by which a minority opinion becomes a majority opinion in called the snowball effect. At first, people who are convinced by the minority viewpoint are few, but as more and more people change their attitude, the minority gains power and status. Eventually, the minority gains so many converts to their viewpoint, they actually become the majority and the norm in society. 
• Social Change Through Majority Influence

  • Research links behavioral choices to group norms.

  • Environmental and health campaigns exploit conformity processes.

  • Information about others' actions encourages social change.

  • Changes in perceptions of social norms can alter behavior.
• Social change through minority: Gradual or rapid?

  • A limitation of minority influence is that it is only indirectly effective in creating social change
  • Nemeth (1986) suggests that the effects of minority influence are indirect and delayed. 
  • For example, it took decades for attitudes against drink-driving and smoking to shift
  • This suggests that using minority influence to explain social change is limited because it shows that effects take a very long time to occur, if they occur at all
• Minorities perceived as deviant

  • A limitation of using minority influence to explain social change is that minorities are often unsuccessful in creating social change because they are seen as deviant by the majority
  • Members of the majority may not want to align themselves with the minority so they are not seen as deviant themselves. Therefore, the majority does not pay attention to the message of the minority
  • Therefore, minorities face the double challenge of avoiding being portrayed as deviants and also making people directly embrace their position
• Support for majority influence in social change

  • A strength of majority influence in social change is that research supports social norm interventions
  • When a social norms intervention campaign informed people the actual social norm was not drink-driving, such behaviour fell by 13.7%
  • This finding supports the real life application of social norms interventions in social change because it shows that when people’s misperceptions about others’ behaviour is corrected, positive changes in behaviour can occur 
• Limitations of Social Norms Approach

  • Interventions may not always result in societal change.

  • De Jong et al. (2009) study: Students didn't lower alcohol consumption.

  • Social norms alone may not be sufficient for societal change.