MINORITY INFLUENCE

→ Form of social influence in which a minority persuades others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours

→ Minority influence leads to internalisation or conversion, in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviour

~CONSISTENCY~

  • The more consistent a minority is about their views, the more interest is shown from other people

  • This consistency might be agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic consistency - they’re all saying the same thing) and/or consistency over time (diachronic consistency - they’ve all been saying the same thing for some time now)

~COMMITMENT~

  • Minorities engage in extreme activities to draw attention

  • These activities may be risky, which demonstrates their commitment to the cause, which catches the attention of the majority group members

  • This is called The Augmentation Principle

~FLEXIBILITY~

  • Psychologists argued that being extremely consistent and repeating the same arguments can be seen as rigid and inflexible

  • This is off-putting to the majority, and is unlikely to gain many converts to the minority position

  • Instead, members of the minority need to be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept valid counter-arguments

  • The key is to strike a balance between consistency and flexibility

~THE PROCESS OF CHANGE~

  • If you hear something new, then you might think about it, especially if the source of this other view is consistent and passionate

  • It is this deeper processing which is important in the process of conversion to a different, minority viewpoint

~THE SNOWBALL EFFECT~

  • For a minority to influence a majority group, they try to convince one person at a time to agree with their views

  • Over time, more people join the minority’s views, until the minority becomes the majority

EVALUATION

Research Support

→ RESEARCH SUPPORT FOR CONSISTENCY

  • One strength is research evidence demonstrating the importance of consistency.

  • Moscovici’s blue/green slide study showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect in changing the views of other people than an inconsistent opinion

  • When the minority opinion was consistent, participants agreed with the confederates 8% of the time. However, when the minority opinion was inconsistent, participants agreed with the confederates 1% of the time.

  • This suggests that presenting a consistent view is a minimum requirement for a minority trying to influence a majority.

→ RESEARCH SUPPORT FOR INTERNALISATION

  • In a variation of Moscovici’s study, participants were allowed to write down their answers so that their response was private

  • Surprisingly, private agreement with the minority position was greater

  • This means that the majority were being influenced by the minority, and therefore changed their views, but did not want to share them publicly for fear of being seen as ‘weird’ or ‘awkward’

  • This shows that despite being reluctant to admit views publicly, participants privately change their opinion, showing that they internalised what the minority influence was saying.

Conflicting Evidence

→ ARTIFICIAL TASKS

  • One limitation of minority influence research is that the tasks involved are artificial.

  • For example, Moscovici et al’s task of identifying the colour of a slide is a very artificial and doesn’t reflect how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real-life

  • Research is therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities in real-life

  • This means findings of minority influence studies are lacking in external validity, and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-world social situations

→ UNREPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE

  • Another limitation of minority influence research is that the findings cannot be generalised.

  • For example, Moscovici only used female students as participants in his sample.

  • Females are often considered to be more conformist than males and therefore there may be a difference in the ways that females and males respond to minority influence.

  • Therefore, it could be argued that the results cannot be generalised to the rest of the population as he used an unrepresentative sample.