Social Change Flashcards
What are the steps of social change? (Through minority influence )
1) drawing attention to the cause
2) consistency
3) commitment ( lincluding augmentation principle )
4) snowball effect
5) social cryptoamnesia
What is drawing attention to the cause?
- Minorities cannot start to bring about social change without first drawing attention to the cause.
What is consistency?
Minorities are more influential if they express their arguments consistently
What is commitment including augmentation principle?
If a minority appears willing to suffer for their cause/views they are seen as more committed and are taken more seriously by majority.
What is the snowball effect?
Once a few members of the majority start to move towards the Minor position, then the influence of the minors again/gather momentum.
– More people gradually pay attention to the minority view, until it reaches the tipping point, at which it leads to wide scale social change
What is social crypto amnesia?
– Refers to the idea that people remember a change in social attitudes but they forget the origins of that chain/the people who are responsible for it.
– A society might adapt new behaviours or beliefs that have been promoted by minority group, but over time they forget who originally advocate for the change.
– They accept the new norms without remembering the struggles of individuals who pushed for change in the first place.
What is the augmentation principle?
States that if there are risks involved in putting forward a course/particular point of view (e.g. abuse), others are more likely to take those to express those views more seriously.
What are the two steps of social change through majority influence?
NSI
– obedience
How is NSI an explanation for social change?
– Some people conform to social change as they do not want to be left out (for example everybody goes to the gym you should too)
How is obedience an explanation for social change? (through majority influence)?
– milligrams research demonstrates the role of gradual commitment (instead of completely shutting something down).
– Social change must be most likely if the change starts off small (for example in his research 15 volts). And gradually increase, making it harder to resist a bigger change (for example in his research, 30 V).
What is an evaluation point of social change? (strengths)?
P – it has supporting research (Nolan et al)
E – researchers hung messages on front doors of houses every week for a month. The key message was most residence were trying to reduce energy consumption. The message/control group was asking to save energy. The findings were that there was a significant decrease in experimental group/energy.
L – this is strength as it supports the link between NSI and social change (consistency in minority influence) increasing internal validity of the theory .
