Minority Influence

What is minority influence?

When members of a majority group are converted to the views of a minority. The effectiveness of a minority can be affected by consistency, commitment and flexibility

What are the 3 features of minority influence?

• Commitment

• Consistency

• Flexibility

Consistency..

If members of the minority repeat the same message over time (diachronic consistency) and all group members give the same message (synchronic consistency). Members of the majority group are more likely to consider the minority position and reconsider their own

Commitment..

If the members of a minority are willing to suffer for their views but still hold them, members of the majority will take the minority seriously, as people consider the causes of behaviour. If the majority members know the minority is not acting out of self-interest, they carefully consider their position

Flexibility..

If seen as dogmatic, minorities will not be persuasive, they need the ability to appear to consider valid counterarguments and show they are reasonable by slightly compromising. This flexibility encourages majority members to move closer to the minority position

Attribution Theory

Describes the processes people use to assign motives to behaviour, both their own and others. One feature outlined by Kelley is the augmentation principle, which suggests that if someone performs an action despite costs and risks, the underlying motive or attribute driving that action is considered particularly strong

The Snowball Effect

Minorities changing majority opinions starts as a slow process, as each person only converts a few members of the majority. However, this rate of conversion picks up speed as more and more of the majority convert. Additionally, the process of conversion also speeds up as the minority view improves in its acceptability

Flexibility and consistency together..

While flexibility and consistency seem to contradict each other, a balance between these two factors is needed to appear reasonable and open-minded, as well as having a clear, thought-through and stable opinion

Consistency - AO3

Moscovici (1969) displayed 36 blue slides of different shades to groups of four real participants and two confederates. If the confederate minority consistently claimed every slide was green, participants agreed on 8% of trials but only on 1% of trials when the minority was inconsistent. However, even in the consistent condition, 68% of participants never conformed to the minority, this may mean that few people are receptive to the influence of a consistent minority group

Flexibility - AO3

Nemeth (1987) asked three real participants and one confederate to act as a mock jury and decide on the level of compensation for the victim of an (imaginary) serious ski lift accident. When the confederate was inflexible, arguing for a low level of compensation ($50,000) and not changing position during negotiations, they were less able to convince members of the majority to lower their offers, than when they showed flexibility by increasing their offer to $100,000 during the negotiation

Artificial Settings - AO3

Lab based studies on factors affecting minority influence, such as Moscovici and Nemeth, are highly artificial and may not be valid when generalised to real world minority influence. In real life, those trying to convince us are often friends and family, and the topics are likely to be important social issues, not meaningless tasks like stating the colour of a slide

Real Life Examples - AO3

The suffragettes showed commitment by going on hunger strike, and the leaders of the civil rights movement delivered speeches with a consistent message of equality. The LGBTQ+ rights movement campaigned for civil partnerships, a strategic (flexible) compromise that ultimately led to the ultimate goal, the full legalisation of same sex marriage.