minority influence

AO1

different factors can enhance the effectiveness of a minority, including

commitment, flexibility and consistency

consistency refers to the way in which a minority influence is more likely to occur when the members share the same belief and retain it over time

AO1 - moscovici

Moscovici 1969 conducted a study to see if a consistent minority could influence a majority to give an incorrect answer, in a colour perception task.

his sample of 172 female ppts were placed in groups of 6 and shown 36 slides, all varying shades of blue

the participants had to state out loud the colour of each slide. 2 of the 6 ppts were confederates. In the consistent condition, 2 confederates said that all 36 slides were green in inconsistent condition said that 24 were green and 12 were blue

Moscovici found that in the consistent condition, the ppts agreed on 8.2% of the trials, where as in the inconsistent condition, the ppts only agreed on 1.25% of the trials

AO3 - used bias sample

Moscovici used a bias sample of 172 female ppts from America. as a result, we are unable to generalise the results to other populations for example male ppts, and we cannot conclude that male ppts would respond to minority influence In the same way.

Moscovicis research can be criticised as being gynocentric as his research takes an exclusive focus on the conforming behaviour of female ppts to a minority influence

furthermore, research often suggests that females are more likely than males to conform and therefore further research is required to determine the effect of minority influence on male ppts to improve the low population validity of the experiment.

AO3 - breaching ethical guidelines

• has been criticised fro breaching ethical guidelines during his study. he deceived his ppts, as they were told that they were taking part in a colour perception test when in fact it was an experiment on minority influence

• this also means that moscivici did not gain fully informed consent. Although, it I seen as unethical to deceive ppts, moscovicis experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results, as the ppts were aware of the true aim they may have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently

• thus a cost benefit analysis would deem that the insight gained from such research was worth the short term cost to the ppts which would be dealt with by means of a debrief following the study.

AO3 - mehtolodical issues with research into minority influence

judging the colour of a slide is an artificial task and therefore lacks mundane realism, since it is not something that occurs everyday

research conditions are criticised as being too far removed from cases of real world minority influence such as political campaigning

the implications of real-world cases are also grossly disproportionate to those seen in a lab setting as they can for some people be the cases of life or death and as such moscovics research lacks external validity.