Minority Influence Flashcards
What is minority influence?
A form of social influence where members of the majority group change their beliefs or behaviours as a result of their exposure to a persuasive minority.
Why do people identify with the majority?
To try and fit in with their opinions without careful scrutiny of the message.
Why don’t people identity with the minority?
Minority influence creates a conversion process whereby, provided the minority adapt a consistent and committed approach, people scrutinise the message itself.
They want to understand why the minority hold this position.
What happens when people convert to the minority position?
Tends to be deeper and longer lasting as people have internalised the minority’s point of view.
What must happen for minority influence to be effective?
Minorities must be…
Consistency
Commitment
Flexibility
What does consistency do?
If the minority are consistent, others come to reassess the situation and consider the issue more carefully.
There must be a reason why the minority takes the position it does and is sufficiently confident to maintain it over time and with each other (Nemeth, 2010).
What did Wood (1994) do?
Carried out a meta-analysis of 97 studies of minority influence, and found that minorities who were perceived as being especially consistent in expressing their position were actually particularly influential.
What does commitment do?
It suggests certainty, confidence and courage in the face of a hostile majority.
May persuade majority group members to take then seriously, or even convert to the majority position.
What is consistency?
Minority influence is effective provided there is stability in the expressed position over time and agreement among different members of the minority.
What is commitment?
The degree to which members of a minority are dedicated to a particular cause or activity.
The greater the perceived commitment, the greater the influence
What is flexibility?
A willingness to be flexible and to compromise when expressing a position.
What did Mugny (1982) suggest?
That flexibility is more effective at changing majority opinion than rigidity of arguments.
Because minorities are typically powerless compared to the majority, they must negotiate their position with the majority rather than try to enforce it.
What’s the problem with flexibility?
A rigid minority that refuses to compromise risks being perceived as dogmatic.
However, a minority that is too flexible and too prepared to compromise risks being seen as inconsistent.
Neither approach is particularity effective at persuading the majority to shift to the minority’s position, but some is better than none (Mugny).
What’s the key study for minority influence?
Moscovici (1969)
What was the procedure of Moscovici’s study?
Each group comprised 4 naive participants and a minority of 2 confederates.
They were shown a series of blue slides that varied only in intensity and were asked to judge the colour of each slide.
In the ‘consistent’ experimental condition, the 2 confederates repeatedly called the blue slides ‘green’ (they said green on every trial).
In the ‘inconsistent’ condition, the confederates called the slides ‘green’ on 2/3 of the trials, and on the remaining 1/3 of trials called the slides ‘blue’.
In a control condition, comprising 6 naive participants and no confederates, participants called the slides ‘blue throughout’.