Minority influence

Minority influence

• Minority influence is when a single person or small group changes the views of a larger group, effectively converting others to their position
• Minority influence is most likely to lead to internalisation- both public behaviour and private beliefs are changed
• Moscovici demonstrated minority influence in a study where a group of six people were asked to view a set of 36 blue- coloured slides that varied in intensity and then state whether the slides were blue or green
• In each group, 2 confederates consistently said the slides were green on two thirds of the trials
• The ppts gave the same wrong answer on 8.42% of trials, 32% gave the same answer as the minority on at least one trial
• A second group of ppts were exposed to an inconsistent minority and agreement fell to 1.25%
• A third control group, there were no confederates and all ppts had to do was identify the colour of each slide. They got this wrong on just 0.255 of the trials
• The study and other esearch have drawn attention to the main to the main processes in minority influence:
  • Consistency
    • Over time, the consistency in the minority's views increases the amount of interest from other people
    • The consistency might be agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic consistency- they are all saying the same thing)
    • The consistency may be over time (diachronic consistency- they have been saying the same thing for some time)
    • Such consistency makes…