Social Influence: social change Flashcards
what’s social change?
this occurs when whole societies rather than just the individuals, adopted new attitudes and ways of doing things. for example, accepting the earth orbits the sun, women suffrage, gay rights and environmental issues.
what are the 6 steps to creating social change?
drawing attention, consistency, deeper processing, augmentation principle, snowball effect, social cryptomnesia
what’s the lessons from conformity research?
environmental and health campaigns increasingly exploit conformity processes by appealing through NSI. they do this by providing information about what other people are doing. it’s encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority is actually doing.
what’s the lessons from obedience research?
obedience can be used to create social change through the process of gradual commitment. once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes more difficult to resist the bigger ones, people drift into a new kind of behaviour.
what’s the research support for normative influences? (A03)
Nolan investigated whether sociala influence led to the reduction of energy consumption in a community. they hung messages on front doors in San Diego every week for 1 month. the key message was that most people were trying to reduce their energy. he found a significant decreases in energy usage. it shows conformity can lead to social change through NSI.
how is minority influence only indirectly effective? (A03)
social change happens slowly and can take decades for attitudes to change. Nemeth argued that minority influence are mostly indirect and delayed. it’s indirect because the majority is influenced on matters related to this issue at hand, not the central issue. the effects can’t be seen for sometime and they’re fragile.
what’s the role of deeper processing? (A03)
Moscovici’s argues that minority and majority influence involves different cognitive processes. minority causes individuals to think more deeply about an issue than majority. Mackie disagreed and presented evidence that majority creates deeper processing if you don’t share their views. this is because we like to believe that other people have the same views as us. when the majority has different beliefs, we are forced to think about their reasoning. this casts doubt on validity.
