minority influence

    Cards (12)

    • minority influence refers to situations where one person or a small group of people influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people. this is distict from conformity where the majority is doing the influencing which is called majority influence. in both cases the people being influenced may be a small or large group.
    • minority influence is most likely to lead to internalisation where both public and private behaviour are changed by the process.
    • moscovinci aim: One of the most influential experiments of minority influence was conducted by Moscovici (1969). He wanted to see if a consistent minority could influence a majority to give an incorrect answer, in a colour perception task.
    • moscovici procedure: His sample consisted of 172 female participants who were told that they were taking part in a colour perception task. The participants were placed in groups of six and shown 36 slides, which were all varying shades of blue. The participants had state out loud the colour of each slide.
    • moscovici findings in trial : 2/6 participants were confederates and in one condition (consistent) the two confederates said that all 36 slides were green; in the second condition (inconsistent) the confederates said that 24 of the slides were green and 12 were blue.
    • moscivici findings after: Moscovici found that in the consistent condition, the real participants agreed on 8% of the trials, whereas in the inconsistent condition, the real participants only agreed on 1% of the trials. This shows that a consistent minority is 7% more effective than an inconsistent minority and that consistency is an important factor in minority influence.
    • consistency in the minoritys views increases the amount of interest from other people. this consistency might be agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic consistency - theyre all saying the same thing) or consistency over time (diachronic consistency - theyve been saying the same thing for some time). consistency makes people start to rethink their own views
    • minorities may engage in extreme activities to draw attention to their views. this is important because it demonstrates commitment to the cause. majority group members then pay even more attention which is called the augmentation principle.
    • consistency, commitment and flexibility make people think about the topic. if you hear something new, your likely to think about it especially if they are consistent and passionate. it is the deeper processing which is important in the process of conversion to a minority point. overtime, increasing numbers of people switch from the majority to minority position. the more this happens the faster the rate of conversion known as the snowball effect as gradually the minority view has become the majority view
    • there is research that demonstrates the importance of consistency. Moscovici et al study showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on other people than an inconsistent opinion. Wood et al carried out a meta analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential. this suggests that consistency is a major factor in minority influence
    • there is research to show that change to a minority position does involve deeper processing of ideas. Martin et al gave participants a message supporting a viewpoint and measured their support. one group of participants heard a minority agree with the view while another group heard this from a majority. participants were exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured. people were less willing to change their opinions if they listened to a minority group. this suggests that the minority message had been more deeply processed
    • a limitation of minority influence is that the artificial tasks involved. for example, in Moscovicis colour slide task and Aschs line judement task. therefore, the research is far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life. in cases such as jury decision making the outcomes are very important. this means findings of minority influence studies are lacking in external validity and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real life scenarios