Download Social influence 5 – minority influence and social change

SOCIAL
INFLUENCE
Real-world examples
Can anybody think of a real-life example of social
change where one person or a small group have
eventually converted the majority to their views or way
of behaving?
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Suffragette movement - women were given the right
to vote.
Martin Luther King – Black Civil Rights Movement
Nelson Mandela/Rosa Parks – Apartheid – Racial
segregation
The Green Movement (recycling)
Campaign against smoking – public smoking ban
Adolf Hitler - Holocaust
Minority influence
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Form of social influence.
Minority (one person or small group) persuade
others to adopt their beliefs/behaviours.
If consistent and active the minority can create
social conflict (doubt) among members of the
majority.
Leads to internalisation (a.k.a. ‘conversion’).
Private attitudes are changed as well as public
behaviours.
First studied by Moscovici et al (1969).
Consistency
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Minorities are more influential when they express
their arguments consistently as this increases the
amount of interest from others.
Synchronic consistency – the minority are all
saying the same thing.
Diachronic consistency – minority have been
saying the same thing over a long period of time.
Same position consistently = must believe it to be
true as views don’t change, taken more seriously,
encourages majority to rethink their own views.
Commitment
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A.k.a. drawing attention to the issue.
Sometimes minorities engage in quite extreme activities
to draw attention to their views.
It is important that these extreme activities are at some
risk to the minority as this demonstrates commitment to
the cause.
E.g. protests which can lead to arrest.
Majority group members then pay even more attention
(“Wow they must really believe what they’re saying is true
so maybe I should consider their views”).
This is called the augmentation principle.
If members of minority willing to suffer for their views, the
impact of their position on other group members is
increased (‘augmented’).
Flexibility
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Nemeth (1986) – NOT consistency, but FLEXIBILITY.
Being extremely consistent and repeating same
arguments can be seen as rigid which can be offputting to the majority and reduce the likelihood
that they will convert to the minority position.
Instead, members of the minority need to be
prepared to adapt their point of view, and
accept reasonable and valid counter-arguments
(i.e. compromise).
They key is to strike a balance between
consistency and flexibility.
The snowball effect
Van Avermaet, (1996)
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Over time, increasing numbers of people switch
from the majority to the minority through the
process of conversion.
Once a few members of the majority start to move
towards the minority position, then the influence of
the minority begins to gather momentum as more
people pay attention to the view.
This is called the snowball effect.
Gradually what started off as the minority view
becomes the majority view.
Social change has occurred!
Group membership
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According to Hogg and Vaughan we are
most likely to be influenced by those we
perceive to be like us (called our ingroup).
If people similar to us express certain
attitudes we are more likely to be
influenced by the minority. Although, it
still takes time to occur.
Conformity research and
social change (pg 34)
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Asch’s research – variation – social support – broke the
power of the majority and encouraged others not to
conform.
This has potential to lead to social change.
Environmental and health campaigns increasingly
exploit conformity processes by appealing to NSI.
They do this providing statistics/information about what
other people are doing.
E.g. reducing litter – print normative messages on litter
bins – ‘Bin it – others do’ and preventing young people
from initiating smoking by telling them most young
people don’t smoke.
In other words, social change is encouraged by drawing
attention to what the majority are actually doing.
Obedience research and
social change (pg 34)
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Milgram’s research clearly demonstrates
the importance of disobedient role
models – variation – social support –allies.
Could be through ‘gradual commitment’
that social change occurs – once a small
instruction is obeyed it becomes much
more difficult to resist a bigger one.
Supporting evidence for NSI
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Nolan et al (2008) – investigated whether social
influence processes led to reduction in energy
consumption in a community.
Hung messages on front doors of houses in San Diego,
California every week for 1 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 then to save energy but made no
reference to other people’s behaviour.
Found a significant decrease in energy usage in
experimental group.
This is a strength as it shows that conformity can lead to
social change through the operation of NSI.
Role of deeper processing
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Moscovici’s conversion explanation of minority influence
argues that minority and majority influence involve
different cognitive processes.
Minority – internalisation – think deeply about issue.
Mackie (1987) disagrees and argues that it is majority
influence that may create deeper processing if you do
not share their views. This is because we like to believe
that other people share our views and think in the same
way as us. When we find that a majority believes
something different then we are forced to think long and
hard about their arguments and reasoning.
This means that a central element of the process of
minority influence has been challenged and may be
incorrect, decreasing the validity of Moscovici’s theory.
Methodological issues
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Explanations of how social influence leads
to social change draw heavily on the
studies by Asch, Milgram and Moscovici.
All of these studies can be evaluated in
terms of their methodology.
These criticisms are just as applicable here
and raise doubts about the validity of the
explanations.