SOCIAL INFLUENCE - social influence and social change Flashcards
What is social change?
When societies rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things.
What are the six lessons from minority influence research?
- drawing attention
- consistency
- deeper processing
- the augmentation principle
- the snowball effect
- social cryptomnesia
How does drawing attention and keeping consistent lead to deeper processing?
Drawing attention through social proof and consistently presenting the same messages leads to deeper processing to the majority as they acknowledge and show attention to the minority views.
What is the augmentation principle?
The minority risk their lives to indicate a strong belief and reinforce the message.
What is the snowball effect?
When the minority gradually get the attention of the majority. The Minority then becomes the majority.
What is the social cyrptomnesia?
When people have memory that changes occurred but don’t remember how it happened.
What are the lessons from conformity research?
The Confederate in Ashes research highlighted the importance of the dissent, that has the potential to ultimately lead to social change. Normative social influence is used by environmental health campaigns - providing information about what other peoples do.
eg preventing young people from taking up smoking by telling them that most of the young people do not smoke.
Social changes encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing.
What are the lessons from the obedience research?
Zimbardo 2007 suggested how obedience can be used to create social change during the process of gradual commitment. Importance of disobedient role models.
What are the strengths of these lessons?
+ research support from normative influences.
eg Jessica nolan et al (2008) aim to set if they could change peoples energy used habits. He message was hung on front doors which said: “most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage”
As a control another message was hung which asked them to save energy but made no reference to other peoples behaviour.
There was a significant decrease in energy usage in the first group than the second group. This suggests conformity can lead to social change through normative social influence.
+ Minority influence brings about social change
eg Charles Nemeth (2009) when people consider minority arguments to engage in divergent thinking which is broad. This shows that dissenting minorities are valuable.
What are the limitations of these lessons?
- some studies show that peoples behaviour is not change the exposing them to social norms.
eg David Foxcroft et al (2015) conducted a review which included 70 studies where social norms approach was used to reduce student alcohol use.
Only a small reduction in drinking quantity. Therefore normative social influence does not always produce long-term social change.
-deeper processing may not describe on how minorities bring about social change.
eg Diane Mackie (1987) argues that majority influence creates deeper processing if you do not share their views. The majority actually deeply thinking long and hard about arguments and reasoning against the minority view.
This challanges the validity of the minority influence.
