– Minority influence is a form of social influence in which a minority of people persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours.
– It leads to internalisation or conversion, in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviours
CONSISTENCY
– Over time this increases the amount of interest from other people.
– The consistency might be the views/agreements of the minority group or how long they have been going over time.
– Such consistency makes other people start to rethink their own views.
COMMITMENT
– Sometimes minorities engage in quite extreme activities to draw attention to draw attention to their views.
– It is important that these extreme activities are at some risk to the minority because this demonstrates commitment to the cause. Majority groups then pay even more attention.
– This is called the augmentation principle.
FLEXIBILITY
– Nermeth argued that consistency is not the only important factor in minority influence because it can be interpreted negatively as it can be seen as unbending, dogmatic and inflexible and this is off-putting to the majority.
– Instead, members of the minority need to be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counterarguments.
– The key is to strike balance between consistency and flexibility.
THE PROCESS OF CHANGE
– If you hear something new that you don’t agree with then you might stop to think about it
– It is this deeper processing which is important in the process of conversion to a different, minority view point
– Overtime people switch from the minority position to the majority position
– The more this happens the faster the rate of conversion
– This is called the snowball effect
– Gradually the minority view becomes the majority view
EVALUATION OF MINORITY INFLUENCE
STRENGTHS
Research Support – Consistency
– There is research evidence that demonstrates the importance of consistency.
– Moscovici showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on other people than an inconsistent opinion.
– Wood carried out a meta-analysis of 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as the most consistent were the most influential
– This suggests that consistency plays a huge role in minority influence
Research Support for Flexibility
– Researchers found that in a simulated jury situation group where members discussed the amount of compensation to be paid to someone involved in a ski lift accident.
– When a confederate put forward an alternative point of view this had no effect on the majority
– Then another confederate compromised did exert some influence over the group
– This suggests that flexibility can influence people but only in certain circumstances
LIMITATIONS
Artificial Tasks
– A limitation of minority influence research is that the tasks involved are as artificial as Asch’s line judgement task
– So the participants may have guessed the aim of the experiment and just did what they thought the experimenters wanted them to do.
– This means findings of minority influence studies such as Moscovici are lacking in external validity and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real life social situations.