minority influence

• what is minority influence?


  refers to a situation where one person or a small group of people influence the beliefs and behaviours of others. will lead to internalisation
• who studied the blue slide, green slide?

  Moscovici
• what are the 3 things a minority group need to have to influence someone else beliefs?


  1. C consistency
  2. C commitment
  3. F flexibility
• what is consistency?


  they must be consistent in their views, it will increase the amount of interest from other people. a consistent minority can make other people start to question their own views.
• what is synchronic consistency?


  they're all saying the same thing
• what is diachronic consistency?


  they've been saying the same thing for some time now
• what is commitment?


  must demonstrate commitment to the cause or views. may engage in extreme activities to draw attention to the cause
• what is the argumentation principle?


  if a person performs an action when there are known constraints and risks to them, their motivation for acting must be stronger.
• what is flexibility?


  member of the minority need to be able to be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counterpoints.
• who argued that consistency is not the only important factor and why?

  Nemeth 1986.

  it can be off-putting and someone who is extremely consistent and repeats the same stuff over and over may seem rigid and dogmatic, therefore on its own is unlikely to gain converters.
• one strength is research demonstrating the importance of consistency. Moscovici's blue/green study showed that consistent minority opinion had a greater effect than inconsistent minority opinion. wood et al 1994 carried out a meta-analysis of 100 studies and found that consistent minority opinion had a greater effect than inconsistent minority opinion. suggesting that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement or a minority trying to influence a majority.
• one strength is that there is research to support that a change in the majority's position does involve deeper processing of the minority's ideas. Martin et al. 2003 the participants were shown a message supporting a statement. one group of participants heard the minority agreeing whilst the other heard the majority agreeing. Participants were less likely to change their views if they heard the minority group agreeing rather than the majority. suggests the minority's ideas have to be more deeply processed than the majority.
• one limitation of minority influence is that the tasks involved are often just as artificial as Asch's line judgment task. Mosocvici's task of identifying the colour of a slide. cannot be generalised to everyday life. this means that findings for minority influence do not have high levels of internal validity.