social change Flashcards
Define social change.
The process by which society changes beliefs, attitudes and behaviour to create new social norms.
Describe the process of social change through social influence.
Minority influence incurs social change over time by altering attitudes and behaviour - this involves internalisation, and is therefore long-lasting.
Majority influence then maintains the new social order until a new minority influence emerges to repeat the process.
The slow pace of social change through minority influence allows new ideas to be checked for their sustainability in mainstream society.
People who resist social influence can incur social change by modelling attitudes and behaviour necessary for social change to occur.
What are the four ways social change happens?
minority influence, zeitgeist, snowball effect, social cryptoamnesia.
Briefly outline minority influence as a factor in how social change happens.
Social change begins with a minority group. Moscovini research informs us that consistency, flexibility and commitment are important for a minority to start a change.
Briefly outline zeitgeist as a factor in how social change happens
Spirit of the times. What things were happening at the time that made people think a change was in order.
Briefly outline the snowball effect as a factor in how social change happens
When the idea gets had, lots of people join in and attitudes begin to change quickly.
Briefly outline social cryptoamnesia as a factor in how social change happens.
After a number of members have shifted their opinion to agree with the minority group, that minority becomes a majority.
What is an example of social change?
Smoking.
Describe smoking as an example of social change.
For many years smoking was the norm, as was the toleration of others smoking in public places, such as in pubs, on buses etc. The few opponents were viewed as interfering busybodies and killjoys.
The consistent minority influence of smoking being unhealthy and an invasion of others’ privacy eventually started to win people over.
Converts were few at first, but more and more people came to agree with the minority viewpoint. A healthy lifestyle became the zeitgeist - it was the spirit of the times.
The snowball effect occurred eventually, and the anti-smoking viewpoint became mainstream and enshrined in law, such as bans on smoking in public places.
Now we have social cryptoamnesia, where majority influence now serves to maintain the anti-smoking norm.
Discuss research support for normative influences as a strength of social change.
One strength is that research has shown that social influence processes based in psychological processes do work.
Nolan et al (2008) aimed to see if they could change peoples energy-use habits. The researchers hung messages on the front doors of houses in San Diego every day for a month. The key message was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. As a control, some residents had a different message that asked them to save energy but made no reference to other peoples behaviour. There were significant decreases in energy usage in the first group compared to the second.
This shows that conformity can lead to social change through the operation of normative social influence, increasing the validity of the explanation.
However, some studies show that peoples behaviour is not always changed through exposing them to social norms. Foxcroft et al (2015) reviewed social norms interventions as part of the ‘gold standard’ Cochrane collection. This included 70 studies where the social norms approach was used to reduce student alcohol use, and he found that only a small reduction in drinking quantity and no effect on drinking frequency.
Therefore this suggests that using normative influence doesn’t always produce long-term social change, thus limiting the explanations validity.
