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What is Minority Influence?
A minority rejects the norm of the majority of group members and persuades the majority to move to the position of the minority.
Which type of Conformity is Minority Influence likely to lead to?
Internalisation - both public and private acceptance.
What are the key factors to Minority Influence?
Consistency
Commitment
Flexibility
(4. Snowball Effect, 5. Social-Crypto Amnesia)
Consistency
Representing the same view point over a sustained period of time without wavering.
Over time consistency in the minority’s views increases the amount of interest from other people.
Consistency is a combination of :
Synchronic consistency - people in the minority are all saying the same thing.
Diachronic consistency - they have been saying the same thing for a long time.
Evidence of Consistency - Moscovici’s ‘blue slide, green slide’ study.
Commitment
Shows the majority how strongly they believe in their cause.
Often involves risk-taking behaviour.
Augmentation Principle - The minority putting themselves at risk, demonstrating commitment and increasing the amount of interest from the majority group.
Flexibility
Minority compromising
To be seen as less extreme, more cooperative and reasonable.
Evidence of Flexibility - Nemeth study.
Outline Nemeth’s study.
Nemeth contracted a mock jury in which there were 3 genuine PPs and 1 confederate. They had to decide on the amount of compensation to give a ski life accident victim. When the confederate would not change from a low amount which seemed unreasonable, the majority stuck together at a much higher amount. However, when the confederate changed his compensation offer a bit, so did the majority.
What was the aim of Moscovici’s study?
He wanted to see if a consistent minority could influence a majority to give an incorrect answer, in a colour perception task.
Moscovici’s procedure.
PPs were shown slides of clearly-different shades of blue and asked to state the colour aloud.
Condition 1 - minority confederates consistently answered green every time.
Condition 2 - minority confederates inconsistently switched between colours.
Condition 3 - control conditions, no confederates present.
Moscovici study findings
Inconsistent group - 1% conformity to minority
Consistent group - 8% conformity to minority
Shows that consistency is a factor in minority influence.
Evaluating minority influence - strengths.
Research support, Moscovici and Nemeth studies.
Research support for internalisation, variation of Moscovici’’s study PPs were allowed to write down their responses privately instead of announcing. Private agreement with the minority was greater, so they had been reluctant to admit this publicly.
Evaluating minority influence - weaknesses.
Research criticisms, research based on experiments conducted in laboratories raises the question of ecological validity.
Sample criticism, bias sample of all American females so hard to generalise findings. Also, could be that four people are not enough for a group and to be considered as a majority.
