Social Influence and Social Change

Social Influence: The process by which individuals and groups change each other’s attitudes and behaviours. Including conformity, obedience and minority influence.

Social Change: This occurs when whole societies, rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things. Examples include women’s suffrage, gay rights and environmental issues.

Steps to Create Social Change: Drawing attention through social proof, consistency, deeper processing of the issue, the augmentation principle, the snowball effect and social cryptomnesia.

Social Cryptomnesia: People have a memory that change has occurred but don’t remember how it happened.

Role of Minority in Conformity Research: Environmental and health campaigns exploit conformity processes by appealing to NSI by providing information about what other people are doing. Examples include reducing litter by printing normative messages on litter bins and preventing young people from smoking by drawing attention to how most don’t.

Role of Minority in Obedience Research: Zimbardo suggested how obedience can be used to create social change through the process of gradual commitment. Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes much more difficult to resist a bigger one.

Research Support for Normative Influences (Social Influence + Change): Nolan et al (2008) aimed to see if they could change people’s energy use habits. They hung messages on the front doors of houses in Sand Diego, every week for one month with the key message was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. The residents that had a different message that just asked them to save energy didn’t save their energy as much as the first group.

Minority Influence Explains Change: Nemeth (2009) claims social change is due to the type of thinking that minorities inspire (deeper thinking). This type of thinking is broad rather than narrow, in which the thinker actively searches for information and weighs up more options which leads to better decisions and more creative solutions to social issues.

Limitation of Deeper Processing: Diane Mackie (1987) presents evidence that it is majority influence that may create deeper processing if you do not share their views because we like to believe that others share out views and think in the same ways as us so we think deeper about the majority’s views.

Research Provide Advice (Social Influence + Change): Research provides practical advice useful to a minority wanting to influence majority opinion or behaviour, such as in the feminist movement.