1.4 Minority Influence

What is Minority influence?

• When a small group of people or even an individual changes the attitudes, behaviours and beliefs of the majority. This is the opposite of conformity, where the majority are the ones influencing others to join them.

What is Conversion in Minority influence?

• The process where the majority gradually adopt a new minority viewpoint or behaviour. This new belief or behaviour becomes accepted both publically and privately.

• Its a type of internalisation and happens through informational social influence. 

What is Cryptomnesia in terms of Minority Influence?

• The process by which minority attitudes, behaviours and beliefs become majority held views

• The new belief takes form without a conscious understanding of where it came from or the processes involved.

What are the three main processes of minority influence by Moscovici (1969)?

- Consistency;

- Commitment;

- Flexibility.

What is Consistency?

• The minority has to be consistent in their views as this increases the amount of interest from others and gets people to start to rethink their own opinions.

Two types of consistency are:

• Synchronic consistency: They're all saying the same thing

• Diachronic consistency: They've been saying the same thing for a long period of time.

What is Commitment?

• The minority has to show full commitment to their views and show this through their actions, which can be extreme in some cases. It also implies extreme actions or having extreme views makes the majority think that the minority group must truly believe what they are doing.

• This then may cause them to rethink their own opinions, and it's called the argumentation principle.

What is Flexibility?

• The minority has to be able to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counter opinions, the minority have to be able to have a balance between both consistency and flexibility. They cannot be dogmatic in their views.

What is Social change?

• It is a shift or change in society's beliefs, behaviours and attitudes. It is also a continuous but gradual change and usually, minority influence is the driving force behind societal changes. Minority viewpoints slowly win over the majority, making society itself change.

What is the social impact theory? Latané and Wolf (1981)

It states that three factors cause social impact when combined in sufficient measure.

• Immediacy: how recent or physically close the source of pressure is.

• Numbers: the size of the group applying pressure.

• Strength: how powerful the person/group applying pressure is.

e.g. Minority groups are fewer in number than majority groups. But they can still cause social impact if they have enough strength and immediacy.

What is the support and criticism for the Social impact theory?

• Sedikides and Jackson (1990) conducted a field experiment in the bird house at a zoo which supported Latané and Wolf's findings.

• Mullen (1985) analysed data from social impact theory studies. He criticised many for focusing on self report instead of observable behaviour.

What was Moscovici et al. (1969) experiment?

• Laboratory experiment.

• 192 female participants.

• The women were split into groups of six with two confederates per group. There was one control group with no confederates.

• Groups were asked to identify the colour of 36 slides. All were different shades of blue.

  • The consistent confederates identified all 36 slides as green.

  • The inconsistent confederates identified 12 slides as blue and the other 24 as green.

What was the findings and evaluation for Moscovici et al. (1969)?

• Groups with consistent confederates - 32% of natural participants identified at least one slide as green. Around 8% of the time, participants identified slides as green.

• Groups with inconsistent confederates - around 1% of the time, participants identified slides as green.

• Control group - around 0.25% of the time, participants identified slides as green.

• Minority groups had more influence when they behaved consistently rather than inconsistently.

• Pros:

  • Control group result - proves that the minority groups had influence.

• Cons:

  • Low ecological validity (cannot be generalised well) - because participants were in an artificial situation.

  • Low generalisability - female participants only.

What are the 5 main process of minority influence?

1. Drawing attention to an issue. Minorities can bring about social change by drawing the majority’s attention to an issue. If their views are different to those held by the majority, this creates a conflict that they are motivated to reduce.

2. Cognitive conflict. The minority creates a conflict between what majority group members currently believe and the position of the minority. It means that majority group members think more deeply about the issues being challenged

3. Consistency of position. Minorities tend to be more influential in bringing about social change when they express their arguments consistently.

4. The augmentation principle. If a minority appears willing to suffer for their views, they are seen as more committed and so taken more seriously by others.

5. The snowball effect. Minority influence initially has a relatively small effect but this then spreads more widely as more and more people consider the issues being promoted, until it reaches a ‘tipping point’, at which point it leads to wide-scale social change.