Processes in social change

Social change

Social change refers to the ways in which a society (rather than an individual) develops over time to replace beliefs, attitudes and behaviour with new norms and expectations

• Methods have been used in attempts to bring about social change including education, persuasion and brute force

Process

1. Draw attention

2. Cognitive conflict

3. Consistency of position

4. Augmentation principle

5. Snowball effect

6. Social crypto amnesia

Snowball effect/ Social Crypto amnesia

Convincing people gradually and gradually by ignoring the masses temporarily and instead focusing on influence to individuals, this leads to more and more people joining/ accepting

Society then forgets that it was any different and that ‘norm’ becomes completely regular

HOW does conformity lead to social change?

Society conform to the influence of the process due to seeing others accept it or recognizing it as a new norm and compelling others to accept it too

Applications +

• One strength of social change is that it has strong practical applications

• For example, the implementing of covid changes/ restrictions. By gradually adding restrictions as the spread worsened, it created a new ‘norm’ for people before the harsh lockdowns began, preventing rejection of restrictions and riots

• This shows that social change is best created gradually and in a flexible way especially when it involves a large change such as covid lock down as it allowed society to prepare properly and create a safer country

• Therefore it can be inferred that social change processes have positive outcomes on entire societies when new laws/ rules are implemented country wide

Methodological issues -

• However there are some methodological issues regarding social change processes

• As participants in laboratory experiments are rarely accurate to real groups as they are more likely a collection of students who don’t know each other and won’t interact again

• There is also often an artificial task and therefore it can be stated that research into social change process cannot be used to explain social change in a real environment

• This suggests that the concepts arising from research may not have the full explanatory power as the research lacks ecological validity

Research +

• There is supporting research for the assumptions of minority influence and social change

• Moscovici’s study can support how social change comes about as the consistency condition had a higher percentage of conformity (8.4%) then the inconsistent condition where only 1.3% conformed

• This implies that consistency from a minority is an important part of a minority influencing social change as the consistency of a minorities belief is a stage in the process towards social change

• Therefore explaining how minority brings about change in the rebel world

Holistic processes -

• One strength is that social change can be viewed as holistic

• The theory takes into account a number of factors e.g how consistent a minority needs to be, but flexible at the same time and willing to take risks

• This shows that there are numerous methods of inflicting change therefore if one aspect isn’t possible then there is numerous other routes to enact social change, for example if Greta thumberg remained consistent with her message of climate change and was flexible with how she portrayed herself to multiple generations but wasn’t overly committed she would still be able to influence a majority and enact social change

• This implies that social change processes are a result of powerful factors that drive minorities to bring about change