9. minority influence Flashcards
Minority influence is most likely to lead to
internalisation - both public behaviour and private beliefs are changed by the process.
MINORITY INFLUENCE refers to
how is it different from conformity
situations where one person or a small group of people (a minority) influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people.
This is distinct from conformity where the majority is doing the influencing.
In both cases the people being influenced may be just one person, or a small group or a large group of people.
MOSCOVICI findings
for both consistent and inconsistent minority conditions
The true participants agreed with the minority and gave a wrong answer 8.42% of the time.
A second group of participants were exposed to an inconsistent minority said green 24 times and blue 12 times. In this case, the conformity to the minority fell to 1.25%.
how did MOSCOVICI demonstrate the effect of minority influence?
procedure
where a group of 6 people was asked to view a set of 36 blue-coloured slides that varied in shades and asked to state whether it was blue or green.
In each group there were 2 confederates who consistently said the slides were green.
1 . CONSISTENCY
The minority must be consistent in their views.
Over time, this consistency increases the amount of interest from other people.
Consistency can take the form of
DIACHRONIC and SYNCHRONIC consistency
agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic 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).
A consistent minority makes other people start to rethink their own views.
AO3 - strength of MINORITY INFLUENCE
research support for consistency - Wood meta analysis
One strength is research evidence demonstrating the importance of consistency.
Moscovici et al.’s blue/green slide study showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on changing the views of other people than an inconsistent opinion. Wood et al. carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential.
This suggests that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement for a minority trying to influence a majority.
2 . COMMITMENT
The minority must demonstrate commitment to their cause or views.
Sometimes minorities engage in quite extreme activities to draw attention to their views.
It is important that these extreme activities present some risk to the minority because
augmentation principle
this shows greater commitment.
Majority group members then pay even more attention.
This is called the augmentation principle.
All of the three factors make people think about the minority’s view or cause.
Hearing something you already agree with doesn’t usually make you stop and think. But if you hear something new, then you might think more deeply about it, especially if the source of this other view is consistent, committed, and flexible.
It is this deeper processing which is important in the process of conversion to a different, minority viewpoint. Over time, increasing numbers of people
switch from the majority position to the minority position. They have become ‘converted’.
The more this happens, the faster the rate of conversion. This is called the snowball effect. Gradually the minority view has become the majority view and change has occurred.
3 . FLEXIBILITY
Nemeth argued that consistency is not the only important factor in minority influence because it can be off-putting. Someone who is extremely consistent, who simply repeats the same old arguments and behaviours again and again may be seen as rigid, unbending, and dogmatic.
This approach on its own is unlikely to gain many converts to the minority position.
Instead, members of the minority need to be
prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counterarguments.
The key is to strike a balance between consistency and flexibility.
AO3 - limitation of MINORITY INFLUENCE
artificial tasks
One limitation of minority influence research is that the tasks involved are often just as artificial as Asch’s line judgement task.
This includes Moscovici et al.’s task of identifying the colour of a slide. Research is therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life. In cases such as jury decision-making and political campaigning, the outcomes are vastly more important, sometimes even literally a matter of life or death.
This means findings of minority influence studies are lacking in external validity and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-world social situations.
AO3 - strength of MINORITY INFLUENCE
research support for the role of deeper processing - Martin (agreements)
Another strength is evidence showing that a change in the majority’s position does involve deeper processing of the minority’s ideas.
Martin et al. presented a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured participants agreement. One group of participants then heard a minority group agree with the initial view while another group heard a majority group agree with it. Participants were then exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured again.
People were less willing to change their opinions if they had listened to a minority group than if they had listened to a majority group.
This suggests that the minority message had been more deeply processed and had a more enduring effect, supporting the central argument about how minority influence works.
