Minority influence including reference to consistency, commitment and flexibility

Minority situaton refers to situation where one person where one person or a small group of people influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people / the majority. this is different from conformity as the majority isn`t doing the infuencing. Minority influence is most likely to lead to internalisation.

Moscovici first studied this process in his `blue slide, green slide` study. This study and others like it have drawn attention to the processes involved in minority influence.

Consistency:

consistency in the minority view increase the amount of interest from other people. this consistency may be agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic consistency - everyone saying the same thing) and or consistency over time (diachronic synchrony - they`ve been saying the same thing for a long time now). such consistency makes other people start to rethink thier own views.

Commitment:

some minorities engage in some extreme activities to draw attention to their views. it is importnat aht these activities cause a risk to the minority to emphasise their commitment to their views. Majority members may pay them more attention for it. this is known as the augmentation principle.

Flexibility:

Nemeth 1986 argued that consistency is not the only important factor in minority influence as it can be interpreted negatively. being extremely consistent and repeating the same arguments / behaviours over and over can be seen as unbending, dogmatic an inflexible. This is off-putting to the majority and is unlikely to lead to any conversions. instead, members of the minority…