Power of minority influence

Question 1

Power of minority influence

Answer 1

On the one hand, minority influence must be quite rare when even a consistent minority could only generate a change of view around 8% of the time. So perhaps it is not a useful concept to explain the vast majority of social influence.
However, the finding about writing answers down suggests that more people were influenced than were prepared to admit it. Perhaps this happens in the real world because people don’t want to be associated with a minority position for fear of being considered ‘radical’, ‘awkward’ or even ‘a bit weird’.
So we can assume that those who do ‘go public’ hold their new views strongly. This is a type of influence called internalisation (see page 18) – these people have been converted to the minority view.
Therefore the findings suggest that although minority influence is relatively unusual, it is a valid form of social influence because when it happens it influences people very powerfully and permanently.

Question 2

support for consistency

Answer 2

One strength is research evidence demonstrating the importance of consistency.
Moscovici et all’s blue/green slide study (see facing page) showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on changing the views of other people than an inconsistent opinion. Wendy Wood et al. (1994) carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential.
This suggests that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement for a minority trying to influence a majority.

Question 3

Research support for deeper processing

Answer 3

Another strength is evidence showing that a change in the majority’s position does involve deeper processing of the minority’s ideas.
Robin Martin et al. (2003) presented a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured participants” agreement. One group of participants then heard a minority group agree with the initial view while another group heard a majority group agree with it. Participants were finally exposed to a conflicting view an attitudes were measured again.
People were less willing to change their opinions if they had 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, supporting the central argument about how minority influence works.

Question 4

Counterpoint Research studies

Answer 4

Counterpoint Research studies such as Martin et al’s make clear distinctions between the majority and the minority. Doing this in a controlled way is a strength of minority influence research. But real-world social influence situations are much more complicated. For ovamnlo mainritios riciallu have a lot more nowor and status than minorities. Minorities are very committed to their causes - they have to be because they often face very hostile opposition. These features are usually absent from 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.

Question 5

Artificial tasks

Answer 5

One limitation of minority influence research is that the tasks involved are often just as artificial as Asch’s line judgement task.
This includes Moscovici et al’s task of identifying the colour of a slide. Research is therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real life. in cases such as jury decision-making and political campaigning, the outcomes are vastly more important, sometimes even literally a matter of life or death.
This means findings of minority influence studies are lacking in external validity and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-world social situations.