Minority influence Flashcards
What is minority influence?
A form of social influence where a minority of people persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviour. Leads to internalisation or conversation, in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviours.
What three factors are important in achieving minority influence?
Consistency, commitment and flexibility.
Describe the role of consistency in minority influence.
- consistency in the minority’s views increases the amount of interest from other people.
- take the form of agreement with synchronic consistency - they’re all saying the same thing and/or diachronic synchrony - consistency over time.
- consistent minority make other people rethink their own view.
Explain the role of commitment in minority influence.
- engage in extreme activities to draw attention to their views.
- extreme activities must pose some risk to demonstrate commitment to the cause.
- majority group members then pay even more attention - augmentation principle.
Describe what role flexibility plays in minority influence.
- Being extremely consistent and repeating the same arguments and behaviours again and again can be seen as rigid, unbending and dogmatic.
- Instead, members of the minority need to be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counter-arguments.
What is the snowball effect?
When these factors used by the minority group and people minds changed persuading more and more of their friends and family to do the same results in the minority view becoming the majority view.
What are the strengths of minority influence?
Research support for consistency - Moscovici et al. and Wood et al.
Research support for change in the majority’s position - Martin et al.
Explain Moscovici et al.’s research.
Participants took part in a colour perception task it was found that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on changing the views of other people than an inconsistent opinion.
Explain Wood et al.’s research.
Carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential.
Explain Martin et al.’s research.
Gave participants a message supported a particular viewpoint and measured their support. Participants then heard a minority group agree with the initial view, whilst another group heard this from a majority group. Both groups were then exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured again. Martin et al found that people were less willing to change their opinion if they had listened to a minority group rather than if they were shared with a majority group.
Suggests minority message more deeply processed.
Give counterpoint for Martin et al.’s research.
Research studies like this done in controlled settings but real-world social influence situations are more complicated.
Majorities - more power and status.
Minorities - have to be more committed to their cause because they often face hostile opposition.
These features absent in minority influence research.
What is a limitation of minority influence research?
Much of the research in this area involves unrealistic tasks in artificial scenarios (such as Moscovici),
therefore they do not tell us about real-life minority influence- they lack external validity. As the supporting research is weakened, so is the explanation.
