Minority Influence Flashcards
What is minority influence
A form of social influence in which a minority of people persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours. Leads to internalisation in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviours
How is minority influence distinct from conformity
As the majority is doing the influencing in conformity
What is synchronic consistency
Agreement between people in the minority group so they’re all saying the same thing
What is diachronic consistency
Consistency in the minority over time, they’ve all been saying the same thing for some time now
Why does consistency in minority beliefs effective
As it increases the amount of interest from other people, such consistency makes other people start to rethink their own views
Why is commitment to minority beliefs effective
Engaging in extreme activities to draw attention to their views demonstrated commitment to the cause, causing majority group members then to pay even more attention
What is augmentation principle
Committed minorities who take risks for their cause tend to affect the majority more as they value the importance of the cause as minority are risking their lives for it, minority not acting our of their own interest
Why is some flexibility effective in converting the majority
-being extremely consistent and repeating the same arguments and behaviours again and again can be seen as rigid and unbending which can be interpreted negatively by majority
How can minority groups show flexibility to convert the majority
-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
How the more the conversion of people from majority to minority position, the faster the rate of conversion for others and gradually the minority view becomes the majority view and change has occurred
Expand on strength that there is research support for consistency
-Moscovici et als study showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on other people that an inconsistent opinion
-Wood et al carried out a meta analysis of similar studies and found that minorities seen as being consistent were most influential
-suggests consistency is a major factor in minority influence
Expand on strength that there is research evidence to show that change to a minority position does involve deeper processing of ideas
-Martin et al gave ppts a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured their support. One group then heard a minority group agree with the initial view while another group heard this from a majority group
-ppts were finally exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured again, found people were less willing to change their opinions if they had listened to a minority group rather than if they were shared with a majority group
-suggests the minority message had been more deeply processed and had a more enduring effect=supports central argument about how the minority influence process works
Expand on limitation of minority influence research is that artificial tasks are involved
-eg identifying the colour of a slide
-research therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life for example in cases such as jury decision making the outcomes are vastly more important than identifying the colour of a slide
-means findings of minority influence studies such as Moscovici et als are lacking in external validity as lack mundane realism meaning they are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-life situations
Which type of conformity does minority lead to
Internalisation (agree publicly and privately) as have to think about views before taking them on, not going along with the majority
Procedure and three conditions used in Moscovici’s study
172 ppts were tested to ensure they were not colour blind and in groups of six (4 ppts and 2 confeds) they were asked to state the colour of 36 slides which were all shades of blue
Condition A: confederates were consistent and called slides green on all trials
Condition B: confederates were inconsistent and called the slides green 24 times and blue 12 times
Condition C: control group with no confederates
