Moscovici, a Romanian born French social psychologist. His experiences of totalitarian governments with their negative attitudes towards social change and innovation inspired him to research minority influence.
AIM:
To investigate the role of a consistent minority upon the opinions of a majority in an unambiguous situation
METHOD:
Participants placed into 32 groups of 6.
A reverse of the Asch studies, so each group was 4 real/naive participants and 2 confederates.
Told it was investigation into perception.
Each group shown 36 blue slides with filters varying the intensity of colour.
CONSISTENT CONDITION - confederates answered wrongly that the slides were green.
INCONSISTENT CONDITION - confederates said 24 slides green (wrong), 12 were blue (right).
Answers given verbally in presence of the group.
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FINDINGS / CONCLUSION
FINDINGS:
8.2% agreement with the minority in the consistent condition. 32% agreed at least once.
1.25% agreement in the inconsistent condition.
CONCLUSIONS:
8.2% seems a small figure it is significantly higher than the figure of 1.25% for the inconsistent condition and shows that akthought minority influence is relatively small, consistency is the important variable.
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EVALUATION
Consistent minorities have even greater influence on private attitudes.
Separate experiment, where participants gave their answers PRIVATELY in another consistent condition, there was even greater agreement.
Only used female participants as he thought they would be most interested in colours. Results thus not generalisable to males.
Unethical as involved deciet, so informed consent could not be given.
Participants may have endured mild stress.
Study does not identify important factors in MI like group size, status or degree of organisation.
Meyers et al. (2000) found minority groups that were successful in affecting majorities were more consistent than those that were not.
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