Minority Influence and Social Change

• One or a small group of people influence the beliefs and behaviours of others.

Types:

Consistency – when a minority keep to the same argument to try to persuade. This makes others think the minority know what they’re talking about

• Synchronic consistency – where all of the minority say the same thing

• Diachronic consistency – remain consistent over time

Commitment – minorities are more powerful if they demonstrate commitment e.g. personal sacrifice and not acting out of self-interest

• Augmentation principle – “he must really believe what he is saying maybe I should listen…” if someone performs an action when there are known constraints, his or her motive for acting must be strong.

Flexibility – minority should be prepared to adapt their PoV and accept reasonable and valid counters.

• By using the three types of influence, the minority gets the majority to think about what’s being argues and process, the processing persuades many in a majority to the minority viewpoint.

• Overtime, increasing numbers of people switch from majority position to the minority view. This is known as being ‘converted’.

• The more this happens, the faster the rate of conversion. This is known as the snowball effect.

• Gradually the minority view becomes the majority view and change occurs.

Aim: to investigate consistency in minority influence

Procedure: 6 P’s to look at 36 blue coloured slides varying in intensity then state whether slides where blue or green. In each group of 6 there were 2 conf. who CONSISTENTLY said the slides were green. A second group had an inconsistent minority.

Findings: in the consistent group, 32% gave the same wrong answer as the minority on at least one trial. The inconsistent group had agreement below 2%.

Conclusion: supports the view that consistency can help to persuade others in minority influence.

Evaluation: it is a lab experiment, giving high control and accuracy. There is also a control group. The study is replicable. It is an artificial study that lacks external validity. This is only showing conformity and the domino effect so it has low internal validity.

:) Wood conducted a meta-analysis of 100 studies and found consistent minorities were more successful and influential

:) The 3 parts to minority influence can cause deeper thinking and more persuasion. This was found in Martin et al.

:) Moscovici variations with private answering show grater minority influence.

• Nemeth found that flexibility of the minority is a key factor. He found this in a study that used a mock jury. However, this was a lab experiment and may not reflect real life minority influence.

:( Research into minority influence is not that clear cut. In real life may other factors alongside the 3 can affect whether people are persuaded that are not considered in many studies.  

• Occurs when whole societies, rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things. They behave differently.

e.g. Africa American Civil Rights:

1. Drawing attention                    - through social proof, e.g. segregation

2. Consistency                              - consistent message with intent e.g. lots of marches

3. Deeper processing                    - question unjustness

4. Augmentation principle          - individuals risking their lives e.g. Rosa Parks, MLK

5. Snowball effect                         - gradually caught attention and change occurs

6. Social Cryptomnesia                - memory of change but forgot how it happened

In real life, environmental and health campaigns increasingly exploit conformity by appealing to normative social influence, by providing information about what other people are doing. Examples include reducing litter by printing normative messages on bins and trying to prevent the youth from smoking by telling them other youth don’t smoke.

Social change is encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing.

Support:
Nolan et al investigated social influence on reducing energy consumption in a community. They hung messages on doors asking to save energy and that most other resident were trying to do the same. A control group only had save energy on the message. They found significant decreases in energy usage in the first group.  

Weakness:
most social change takes a long time to occur making it difficult to establish is minority influence plays a part. Research into social change also ignores the fact that some people may resist being influenced even if they agree it is necessary. E.g. research found people refused to behave in environmentally friendly ways even if they agreed because they did not want the stereotypes of the activists.