Majority influence's role in social change Flashcards
What method did the government find that helps society to changed?
social norm interventions
Why are people more likely to copy the majority’s behaviour?
as they believe this behaviour is due to what most people do
define misconception
this is a false belief about what a person believes the majority does
What method has the UK government been using to change eating /drinking habits of UK residents?
they have been using “nudges” to change these
what is the idea of “nudges” and what are they?
they are based on conformity research like that of Asch’s, where you can subtly create a “story,” including a made-up majority doing something in a certain way that you can get the rest of the population to do to change their behaviour.
What is the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)?
they work with the UK government and have been involved in creating many social norm interventions.
what is a key example of how the BIT influenced change in society?
they used a ‘nudge’ to encourage people to pay their income tax, resulting in an increased amount of people doing so.
what concern did the US state of Montana have and how did they tackle this?
they were concerned that young people aged 21-34 were at substantial risk of drink driving.
they created an advert/media message to reduce numbers of people drink driving.
what was the advert the US state of Montana released and what was the result from this?
the advert stated “most Montana Young Adults (4 out of 5) Don’t drink and drive”
The No. of youths drinking and driving decreased by 13.7% to those states that didn’t use the campaign.
What did Dejong et al. (2009) do in regards to social norm interventions?
they tested the effectivity of social norm interventions to influence alcohol consumption to get decreased across different US sites.
What was the result from Dejong et al. (2009) study?
they found that there wasn’t any effect in any of the states, suggesting social norms aren’t all open to changing via ‘nudges.’
Similar to Dejong et al. (2009) study– What happen in the UK when the government attempted to improve healthy eating?
It failed and instead the body mass indexes increased + the amount of healthy food being consumed barely changed despite the “nudges” from the government.
What did Martin et al. (2009) run a study on regarding minorities and majorities?
they ran a study to see if minority or majority opinions are more resistent to conflicting opinions.
What were the two steps to the method used in Martin et al’s (2009) study regarding minorities/ majorities?
- 48 British students were given messages on voluntary euthanasia that were identified as coming from either minority or majority groups.
- They then were given a second set of messages to determine how much influence these would have on the first messages.
What was the result from Martin et al’s (2009) study regarding minorities/ majorities and what does this suggest?
They found that the minority group messages were the most resistant to the influence of the second set of messages.
This suggests the minority messages can lead to more processing and internalisation then majority messages.
