social change

social change

occurs when whole societies, rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things.

social change - lessons from minority influence research

the steps in how minority social influence creates social change:

(1) drawing attention via social proof

(2) consistency

(3) Deeper processing of the issue

(4) The augmentation principle

(5) The snowball effect

(6) Social cryptomnesia (people have a memory that change has occurred but don't remember how it happened)

social change - lessons from conformity research

Asch's research highlighted the importance of dissent in one of his variations in which one confederate gave correct answers throughout the procedure. This broke the power of the majority, encouraging others to do likewise. Such dissent has the potential to ultimately lead to social change.

A different approach is one used by environmental and health campaigns which exploit conformity processes by appealing to normative social influence. They do this by providing info about what other people are doing. e.g. reducing litter by printing normative messages on litter bins ('Bin it - others do). social change is encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing.

social change - lessons from obedience research

Milgram's research demonstrates the importance of disobedient role models. in the variation where a confederate teacher refuses to give shocks to the learner, the rate of obedience in the genuine pps plummeted.

Zimbardo (2007) suggested how obedience can be used to create social change via the process of gradual commitment. Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes much more difficult to resist a bigger one. People essentially 'drift' into a new kind of behaviour.

AO3 - evaluations of social change

strength: research support for normative influences

strength: psychologists can explain how minority influence brings about social change

limitation: role of deeper processing

AO3 - strength of social change: research support for normative influences

Nolan et al. (2008) aimed to see if they could change people's energy-use habits. The researchers hung messages on the front doors of houses in San Diego, California every week for one month. The key message was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. As a control, some residents had a different message that just asked them to save energy but made no reference to other people's behaviour. There were significant decreases in energy usage in the first group compared to the second. This shows that conformity (majority influence) can lead to social change via the operation of NSI, i.e. it’s a valid explanation.

COUNTER: some studies show that people's behaviour is not always changed via exposing them to social norms. Foxcroft et al. (2015) reviewed social norms interventions as part of the ‘gold standard’ Cochrane Collaboration. This review included 70 studies where the social norms approach was used to reduce student alcohol use. The researchers found only a small reduction in drinking quantity and no effect on drinking frequency. thus it seems that using normative influence doesn’t always produce long-term social change.

AO3 - strength of social change: psychologists can explain how minority influence brings about social change

Nemeth (2009) → social change is due to the type of thinking that minorities inspire. When people consider minority arguments, they engage in divergent thinking. This type of thinking is broad rather than narrow, in which the thinker actively searches for info and weighs up more options. Nemeth argues this leads to better decisions and more creative solutions to social issues.

This shows why dissenting minorities are valuable - they stimulate new ideas and open minds in a way that majorities can’t.

AO3 - limitation of social change: role of deeper processing

deeper processing may not play a role in how minorities bring about social change. Some people are supposedly converted cuz they think more deeply about the minority's views. Mackie (1987) disagrees and presents evidence that it’s majority influence that may create deeper processing if you don’t share their views. This is cuz we like to believe that other people share our views and think in the same ways as us. When we find that a majority believes something different, then we’re forced to think long and hard about their arguments and reasoning.

This means that a central element of minority influence has been challenged, casting doubt on its validity as an explanation of social change.