Minority Influence

Minority influence refers to situations where one person or a small group of people, influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people. This is distinct from conformity where the majority is doing the influencing. Minority influence is most likely to lead to internalisation. 

Moscovici [1976] (minority influence experiment):

• Two confederates were placed in a room with four naive participants
• They were shown 36 slides that were clearly different shades of blue and asked to state the colour of each out loud
• In the first part of the experiment the confederates were consistent and answered green for all 36 slides
• In the second part of the experiment the confederates were inconsistent with their answers and answered green 24 times and blue 12 times
• When with the consistent minority, participants gave the same wrong answer on 8.42% of trials. 32% gave the same answer as the minority on at least one trial
• When with the inconsistent minority, agreement dropped to 1.25%

Consistency:

Over time the consistency in the minority's views increases the amount of interest from other people. This consistency might be agreement between people in the minority group. (Synchonic Consistency - they're all saying the same thing) and/or consistency over time (Diachronic Consistency - they've been saying the same thing for some time now). Such consistency makes other people rethink their own views e.g. 'maybe they've got a point if they all think this way' or 'maybe they've got a point if they have kept saying it'

Commitment:

Sometimes minorites engage in quite extreme activities to draw attention to their views. It is important that these extreme activities are at some risk to the minority because this demonstrates…