Minority influence Flashcards
what is minority influence?
a form of social influence in which a minority of people persuades others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours. Minority influence leads to internalisation, in which both public behaviours and private beliefs are changed by the process.
what are the three main processes in minority influence?
consistency
commitment
flexibility
consistency
Synchronic: They’re all saying the same things
Diachronic: They’ve been saying the same thing for some time now
the minority must be consistent in their views. Over time, this consistency increases the amount of interest from other people. A consistent minority makes other people start to rethink their own views.
commitment
the minority must demonstrate commitment to their cause or views. For example, engaging in extreme activities to draw attention to their views. These activities must pose some risk to the minority as this shows greater commitment. Commitment is effective because it shows the minority is not acting out of self-interest.
flexibility
relentless consistency could be counter-productive if it seen by the majority as unreasonable. Therefore minority influence is more effective if the minority show flexibility by being prepared to adapt their viewpoint and accept reasonable and valid counterarguments.
Explaining the process of change
Snowball effect. Overtime, increasing numbers of people switch from the majority position to the minority position and they become “converted”. The more this happens the faster the rate of conversion. Gradually the minority view has become the majority view and change has occurred.
Evaluation of minority influence (brief)
strength - research evidence for consistency, Moscovici + wood
strength - research evidence for deeper processing HOWEVER controlled, Martin et al
weakness - artificial tasks
strengths of minority influence
there is research evidence demonstrating the importance of consistency. Moscovici’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 the most influential. Therefore, this suggests that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement for a minority trying to influence a majority.
there is research 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. Participants were also exposed to conflicting views and attitudes were measured again. People were less willing to change their opinions if they’d 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. HOWEVER, studies such as Martin et al.’s conduct their research in a controlled way. But real-world social influence situations are much more complicated. For example, in the real-world minorities face very hostile oppositions whereas in minority influence research, the minority is simply the smallest group. Therefore, Martin et al.’s findings are very limited in what they can tell us about minority influence in real-world situations.
weakness of minority influence
the tasks involved in minority influence research are often artificial. For example, Moscovici’s task of identifying the colour of a slide. In cases such as jury decision-making, the outcomes are vastly more important than that of an artificial research task. Therefore, the findings of minority influence lack external validity are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-world social situations.
