Minority Influence Flashcards
What is minority influence?
Situations where a small group (a minority) influences the beliefs and behaviours of other people. It leads to internalisation or conversion.
What are the key factors in successful minority influence?
Consistency, commitment, flexibility.
What is consistency in relation to minority influence?
The minority must be consistent in their views. Over time, consistency draws attention from other people.
List and explain the two types of consistency.
Synchronic consistency: where people all say the same thing “maybe they have a point if they’re all saying the same thing”
Diachronic consistency: saying the same thing for a long time “maybe they’ve got a point if they keep saying it”
What is commitment in relation to minority influence?
Minorities engage in extreme activities to show their commitment. These must show an element of risk to the minority to show the greatest commitment. This is the augmentation principle.
What is flexibility in relation to minority influence?
Nemeth (1986) argued consistency does not convert a majority by itself. The minority must be flexible too, so that they come across as reasonable.
Explain how change occurs in minority influence (deeper processing and the snowball effect)
If a minority is both consistent, committed and flexible, it causes deeper processing in individuals, where they actually stop and think. This is when conversion occurs. The more people who are converted, the faster the rate of conversion- this is the snowball effect.
Who did the ‘blue slide, green slide’ study and when?
Moscovici et al (1969)
Outline the procedure of the ‘blue slide, green slide’ study.
Groups of 6 were asked to view a set of 36 coloured slides, which were either blue or green. In each group, there were 2 confederates, who consistently said the slides were green.
A second group of participants were exposed to inconsistent confederates (they said blue 12 times and green 24 times).
There was also a third control group, where there were no confederates.
Outline the findings of the ‘blue slide, green slide’ study.
In the consistent group, true participants gave the wrong answer (green) in 8.42% of trials. In the inconsistent group, only 1.25% gave the wrong answer. In the control group, the wrong answer was only given 0.25% of the time.
What are the strengths of minority influence?
Evidence demonstrating consistency: Moscovici’s ‘blue slide, green slide’ study showed that a consistent minority had a greater effect on changing views than an inconsistent opinion. Wendy Wood et al carried out a meta analysis of 100 similar studies and found the same results.
Research support for deeper processing: Martin et al measured participants agreement to a statement. he then exposed one group to minority influence, and one to majority influence. When measured again, people who heard the majority view were less likely to change their agreement, than people exposed to the minority group. This suggests the minority message was more deeply processed.
Limitations of minority influence
Research studies such as Martin et al’s makes clear distinguishes between minority and majority influence, but the real world is not that simple.
Most minority influence research uses artificial situations, such as the colour of a slide, which do not correlate to real life. In real life situations, like a jury, or voting, the impact of the results is severe. There is little research on this.
Even i Moscovici’s study in the group with full consistency, the highest rate of conformity to the minority was 8.42%, which suggests minority influence is not as common and important as some once thought.
