Social Influence - Minority Influence

Question 1

What is minority influence?

Answer 1

Minority influence is when one person or a small group of people persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours. This leads to internalisation (conversion).

Question 2

What three processes make minority influence effective?

Answer 2

Three processes make minority influence effective:

1. Consistency – the minority needs to keep the same beliefs over time, and their members need to share the same beliefs. This draws attention to their views and makes the majority rethink theirs.
2. Commitment – the minority needs to show dedication to their position e.g. by making personal sacrifices. This shows that they’re not acting out of self-interest and draws even more attention to their views which makes the majority rethink theirs.
3. Flexibility – the minority needs to accept the possibility of compromise and accept valid counterarguments. This is so that they don’t seem unreasonable as this is off-putting for the majority.

Question 3

Limited real-world application

Answer 3

• Real-life social influence situations are much more complicated than in studies where the majority and minority are defined in terms of numbers.
• For example, majorities often have more power and status than minorities. Minorities are very committed to their causes and have to be because of the very hostile opposition that they face. They can also be tight-knit groups who know each other very well and frequently turn to each other for support.
• This suggests that research on minority influence does not reflect the complexity of real-life minority influence and therefore the results may not be externally valid and so may only tell us about minority influence in contrived situations. Therefore, the results may be of limited use in terms of real-world applications.

Question 4

What were the aims and procedure of Moscovici’s study?

Answer 4

• He wanted to see if a consistent minority could influence a majority to give an incorrect answer, in a colour perception task.
• His sample consisted of 172 female participants who were told that they were taking part in a colour perception task. The participants were placed in groups of six and shown 36 slides, which were all varying shades of blue. The participants had state out loud the colour of each slide.
• Two of the six participants were confederates and in one condition (consistent) the two confederates said that all 36 slides were green; in the second condition (inconsistent) the confederates said that 24 of the slides were green and 12 were blue.

Question 5

What are the results and evaluations of Moscovici’s study?

Answer 5

• Moscovici found that in the consistent condition, the real participants agreed on 8.2% of the trials, whereas in the inconsistent condition, the real participants only agreed on 1.25% of the trials. This shows that a consistent minority is 6.95% more effective than an inconsistent minority and that consistency is an important factor in minority influence.
• Note: It is important to note that consistency and commitment are linked. If a minority is consistent in their view then they also are showing commitment to their cause. Another way a minority can show commitment is through sacrifices, which will be examined in the next section

Evaluation:

1. Moscovici used a bias sample of 172 female participants from America. As a result, we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, for example male participants, and we cannot conclude that male participants would respond to minority influence in the same way. Furthermore, research often suggests that females are more likely to conform and therefore further research is required to determine the effect of minority influence on male participants.
2. Moscovici has also been criticised for deceiving his participants, as participants were told that they were taking part in a colour perception test. This also means that Moscovici did not gain fully informed consent. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Moscovici’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim, they might have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently.

Question 6

Evaluation of minority influence - Weaknesses

Answer 6

1. Limited real-world applications
2. Minority influence research such as Moscovici et al’s study involved an artificial task - identifying the colour of a slide, which is far removed from how minorities attempt to change behaviour of the majority in real life - the consequences of minority influence in real-life are much more important e.g. jury-decision making can be life or death
   - This is a limitation of Moscovici’s study and minority influence as it suggests his findings are low in external validity and are limited in their generalisability to minority influence in daily life
3. Researchers gave participants a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured their support. One group of participants heard a minority agree with the initial view, whilst the others heard this from a majority group. Participants were then exposed to a conflicting view and attitudes were measured again. They found that participants were less willing to change their opinion if they had listened to a majority group rather than if they were shared with a minority.
   - Majority are therefore more likely to have an influence than a minority

Question 7

Evaluation of minority influence - Strengths

Answer 7

1. Moscovici et al’s study showed a consistent minority opinion had more impact that an inconsistent one, with a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies finding the same results
   - This suggests high external validity, and that consistency is possibly a very important factor in the effectiveness of minority influences
2. In a variation of Moscovici et al’s study, participants were allowed to write down their answers so their responses were private rather than public, and private agreement with the minority position was greater in this circumstance. It appears that the majority were persuaded by the minority’s argument and changed their own views, but were reluctant to admit this publicly. Moscovici thought that this was because participants probably didn’t want to be associated with the minority position for fear of being considered radical, awkward or weird
   - Minority influence is possibly an effective way of causing internalisation of ideas as private action is changed, and NSI is preventing expression of this change; minority influence does have an impact
   Counterargument - however, it is not as strong an influence as majority due to extraneous variables of personality and content of the opinion