social influence and social change

• lessons from minority influence research

  1)civil rights marches drew attention to segregation - segregation in 1950s America : Places such as schools and resturants in the southern states were exclusive to whites. Civil rights marches drew attention to the situation by providing social proof of the problem
• lessons from minority influence research

  2)A minority marched but they were consistent : people took part in the marches on a large scale. Even though it was a minority of the American population, they displayed consistency of message and intent
• lessons from minority influence research

  3) Deeper processing : This attention meant that many people who had accepted the status quo began thinking about the unjustness of it
• lessons from minority influence research

  4) Augmentation principle: 'Freedom riders' were mixed racial groups who got on buses in the south to challenge separate seating for black people. Many were beaten and suffered mob violence
• lessons from minority influence research

  5) Snowball effect: Civil rights activist (eg Martin Luther King) gradually got the attention of the US president. In 1964 the Civil rights act was passed, prohibiting discrimination - a change from minority to majority support for civil rights
• lessons from minority influence research

  6) Social cryptomnesia occured : This refers to people having a memory that a change happened but not remembering how. Social change came about but some people have no memory of the events leading to that change
• lessons from conformity research


  Dissenters make social change more likely - Asch's research: variation where one confederate always gave correct answers. This broke the power of the majority encouraging others to dissent. This demonstrates potential to social change
• lessons from conformity research

  majority influence and normative social influence (NSI)- environmental + health campaigns exploit conformity by appealing to NSI. They provide information about what others are doing, e.g. reducing litter by printing normative messages on bins ('bin it - others do '). Social change is encouraged by drawing attention to the majority's behaviour
• lessons from obedience research


  Disobedient models make change more likely: Milgram's research-disobedient models in the variation where a confederate refused to give shocks. The rate of obedience in genuine pp's plummeted
• lessons from obedience research


  Gradual commitment leads to 'drift' : Zimbardo (2007) - once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes more difficult to resist a bigger one. People 'drift' into a new kind of behaviour
• research support for role of NSI in social change

  Nolan et al.(2008) hung messages on front doors of houses. The key message was most residents are trying to reduce energy usage. Significant decreases in energy use compared to control group who saw messages to save energy with no reference to other people's behaviour. So conformity can lead to social change through the operation of NSI
• Identification is an important variable overlooked in minority influence research

  Bashir et al.(2013) suggest people are less likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways because they wanted to avoid label of being minority 'environmentalists'. Pp's rated environmental activists negatively. Minorities wanting social change should avoid behaving in ways that reinforce stereotypes; off-putting to the majority. This suggests that being able to identify with a minority group is just as important as agreeing with their views in terms of changing behaviour
• Limitation is there are methodological issues in this area of research


  Explanations of social change rely on studies by Moscovici, Asch, and Milgram. These can be evaluated in terms of methodology, mainly over the artificial nature of the tasks and whether the group dynamics reflect real-life. These criticisms apply to the evaluation of explanations for the link between social influence processes and social change