1.9 social influence and social change ❤️

Key terms

Social influence — the process by which individuals and groups change each others attitudes and behaviours. Includes conformity, obedience and minority influence

Social change — occurs when whole societies adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things

Lessons from minority influence research

— steps in how minority social influence creates social change —

  1. Drawing attention

  2. Consistency

  3. Deeper processing

  4. Augmentation principle (personal risk indicates strong belief and reinforces their message)

  5. The snowball effect

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

Lessons from conformity research

  • Asch found that when one confederate gave a different answer, it broke the power of the majority, encouraging others to do the same. This has the potential to lead to social change

  • Also exploiting conformity through normative social influence. Encouraging others to do something by saying that others are/ that its the norm (‘bin it - others do’)

Lessons from obedience research

  • Milgram - in a variation where a confederate teacher refused to give the shocks, the rate of obedience of genuine participants dropped

  • Zimbardo - suggests obedience can be used to create social change through the process of gradual commitment. Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes more difficult to resist a bigger one. People ‘drift’ into a new kind of behaviour

Evaluation

Research support for normative influences

  • Nolan. Hung messages on peoples doors about saving energy. Found the messages that referenced other people’s behaviour had significant decreases in energy usage

  • Shows its a valid explanation

  • Counterpoint — however Foxcroft reviewed 70 studies where normative social influence was used to reduce student alcohol use. Only found a small reduction in drinking quality. So it does not always produce long-term social change

Minority influence explains change

  • Nameth claims social change is due to the type of thinking minorities inspire, as it leads to broad and divergent thinking which leads to better decisions and more creative solutions

  • This is why dissenting minorities are values, they stimulate new ideas and open minds in a way majorities cannot

Role of deeper processing

  • deeper processing may not play a role in how minorities bring about social change.

  • Jackie suggests that deeper processing only occurs when majority influences have different views, this is because we want to share others views and think in the same ways

  • So we are forced to think about their arguments and reasoning

Barriers to social change

  • Bashir found that participants are less likely to be environmentally friendly because they did not want to be associated with the stereotypical and minority ‘environmentalists’

  • So there are barriers to minorities causing social change, such as negative stereotypes