social change

Question 1

social change

Answer 1

• when whole societies rather than just an individual , adopt new attitudes , beliefs & behaviours
• e.g suffragettes
• caused by social influence processes such as:
  
  • minority influence
  • conformity
  • obedience

Question 2

minorities & social change: African American Civil Rights Movement (1950s)

Answer 2

• draw attention: marches drew attention to segregation (exclusive restaurants for black people )
• consistency: remained consistent with ideas during protest marches
• deeper processing: people started to think about the unjust system
• augmentation principle: black people commited risky acts that caused a lot of them to be punished
• snowball effect: actvists (MLK) drew attention of the goverment gradually which lead to the Civil Rights Act 1964 that prohibited discrimination
• social cryptomnesia: people know that change occurred but not how it happened

Question 3

minorities & social change: Suffragettes

Answer 3

• draw attention: people like Emily Davidson commited acts that drew attention to their cause of granting women the right to vote
• consistency: remained consistent with ideas as they kept doing acts such as going on hunger strikes
• deeper processing: people started to think about the unjust system
• augmentation principle: chained themselves to railings to get message across
• snowball effect: goverment eventually gave women the right to vote and own property under The Representation of the People Act 1918
• social cryptomnesia: people know that change occurred but not how it happened

Question 4

conformity & social changes

Answer 4

• influence of dissenters: could snowball
• normative social influence: saying what others are doing to fit in with others
• informational social influence: wanting to do the right thing

Question 5

obedience & social change

Answer 5

• gradual commitment: once a small instruction is obeyed it becomes more difficult to resist a bigger one
• people drift into a new kind of behaviour (recycling)
• legitimacy of authority: giving orders
• agentic state: act on the orders of other

Question 6

AO3: research support for normative influences

Answer 6

• Nolan et al (2008): investigated whether social influence processes led to environmental improvements in a community(reduction of energy consumption)
• hung messages on people’s doors that said residents in the area were trying to reduce their energy usage
• control: message didn’t say anything about others reducing their energy
• significant decrease in energy usage in the 1st group
• shows that social change does happen through normative social influence

Question 7

AO3: some studies show that behaviour can’t be changed by exposing people to social norms

Answer 7

• Foxcroft et al (2015): review of 70 studies where social norms approach was used to reduce student alcohol consumption
• only a small reduction in drinking quantity & no reduction on drinking frequency
• normative social influence doesn’t always lead to social change

Question 8

AO3: role of deeper processing

Answer 8

• Moscovici suggests that minority & majority influence have different cognitive processes : minority influence causes people to think more deeply
• Mackie: disagrees and say that majority influence creates deeper processing
• because we like to belive that others share our views & think the same way as us
  when we find that the
• majority thinks something different to us we are forced to think hard about their arguement
• challenges Moscovici’s theory that minority influences involves deeper processing

Question 9

AO3: barriers to social change

Answer 9

• Bashir et al (2013): believed that people can still resist change
• looked at why people resist social change even when they agree it is needed
• found that ppts were less likely to behave in an environmentally friendly way because they didn’t want to be labelled as stereotypical ‘environmentalists’
• suggests that minorities therefore have to avoid reinforcing stereotypes if they want to cause a social change

Question 10

AO3: methodological issues

Answer 10

• explanations of how social influence lead to social change use studies like Asch,Milgram & Moscovici
• they all use artificial tasks that don’t reflect real life
  raises doubt about the validity of the explanations of how social change occurs