SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH MINORITY INFLUENCE
STAGES
1) Drawing attention to an issue
– Minority can bring about social change by drawing attention to a particular social issue
2) Creating a conflict
– Causes a conflict in the minds of the majority, between what they currently believe and the position advocated by the minority
3) Consistent with each other and over time
– Social change is more likely when minority is consistent in their position
4) The augmentation principle
– If a minority appears willing to suffer for their views as they’re taken more seriously
5) The snowball effect
– Minority influence initially has a relatively small effect but this then spreads more widely until it eventually leads to a large-scale social change
6) Social Cryptomnesia
– People don’t remember the events that led to social change
EXAMPLE – SUFFRAGETTES
– They used educational, political and militant tactics to draw attention to the fact that women were denied the same voting rights as men
– They created a conflict in the mind of majority members between the majority position and the position advocated by the suffragettes
– The suffragettes were consistent in their views, regardless of the attitudes of those around them.
– Because suffragettes were willing to risk imprisonment or even death from hunger strike, their influenced became more powerful (augmentation principle)
– Several years after the actions of the suffragettes were finally given the vote. At this point the idea had finally spread to the majority of people (an example of the snowball effect)
SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH MAJORITY INFLUENCE
– Social change can be brought about by changing what is perceived as the social norm
– This is called a social norm intervention which in an attempt to correct misperceptions of normative behaviour of peers in an attempt to change the risky behaviour of a target population
– Eg. The “Most of us don’t drink and drive” American campaign brought drinking and driving down from 20.4% to 13.7%
EVALUATION OF SOCIAL CHANGE
STRENGTH
Research Support – Normative Influences
– Nolan et al.investigated whether social influence processes led to a reduction in energy consumption in a community.
– They hung messages on the front doors of houses in San Diego,California every week for one 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 them to save energy but made no reference to other people’s behaviour.
– Nolan et al.found significant decreases in energy usage in the first group.
– This is a strength because it shows that conformity can lead to social change through the operation of normative social influence.
LIMITATIONS
Minority influence is only indirectly effective
– Social changes happen slowly when they happen at all.
– For example, it has taken decades for attitudes against drink-driving and smoking to shift.
– Do minorities really have much of an influence?
– Charlan Nemeth (1986) argues that the effects of minority influence are likely to be mostly indirect and delayed.
– They are indirect because the majority is influenced on matters only related to the issue at hand, and not the central issue itself.
– They are delayed because the effects may not be seen for some time.
– This could be considered a limitation of using minority influence to explain social change because it shows that its effects are fragile and its role in social influence very limited.
Role of deeper processing
– Moscovici’s conversion explanation of minority influence argues that minority and majority influence involve different cognitive processes.
– That is, minority influence causes individuals to think more deeply about an issue than majority influence (conformity).
– Diane Mackie (1987) disagrees and present evidence 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 ways 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, casting doubt on the validity of Moscovici’s theory.