Minority influence

• Minority influence leads to internalisation - both public behaviour and private beliefs are changed through three processes: consistency, commitment, and flexibility.
• Consistency - means the minority's view gains more interest. 


  Consistency makes others rethink their own views through:

  • Synchronic consistency (people in the majority are all saying the same thing).
  • Diachronic consistency (they've been saying the same thing for some time).
• Commitment - helps gain attention (e.g. through extreme activities).


  Activities must create some risk to the minority to demonstrate commitment to the cause.

  The augmentation principle: majority pay even more attention ('he must really believe in the cause, so maybe I should think about it too').
• Flexibility - the minority should balance consistency and flexibility so they don't appear rigid. 


  Nemeth argued that being consistent and repeating the same arguments and behaviours is seen as rigid and off-putting to the majority.

  Instead, the minority should adapt their point of view and accept reasonable counter-arguments.
• Snowball effect - the minority becomes the majority. 


  Over time, more people become 'converted' - switch from the minority to the majority. The more this happens, the faster the rate of conversion. Gradually the minority view becomes the majority and social change has occurred.
• Moscovici: The blue-green slides - procedure.


  A group of 6 people viewed a set of 36 blue-green coloured slides varying in intensity, then stated whether the slides were blue or green.

  The study had three conditions:

  1. Confederates consistently said the slides were green.
  2. Confederates were inconsistent about the colour of the slides.
  3. A control group - no confederates.
• Moscovici: The blue-green slides - findings & conclusion

  Consistent minority condition: participants gave the same wrong answer on 8% of trials; 32% gave the same answer on at least one trial.

  Inconsistent minority condition: agreement fell to 1%

  Control group: participants wrongly identified colour 0.25% of the time.
• A limitation of minority influence is that research often involves artificial tasks.


  Moscovici's task was identifying the colour of a slide, far removed from how minorities try to change majority opinion in real life. In jury decision-making and political campaigning, outcomes are vastly more important. Findings of studies lack external validity and are limited in what they tell us about how minority influence works in real-life situations.
• The applications of minority influence research are limited.

  Studies make a clear distinction between majority and minority, but real-life situations are more complicated. The difference is about more than just numbers. Majorities usually have power and status. Minorities are committed and tight-knit groups whose members know and support each other. Minority influence research rarely reflects the dynamics of these groups so findings may not apply to real-life minority influence situations which exert a more powerful influence.
• Research evidence demonstrates the importance of consistency. 


  Moscovici found a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on other people than an inconsistent opinion. Wood conducted a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities seen as being consistent were most influential. This confirms that consistency is a major factor in minority influence.