Minority influence
creates social - Moscovici was the first to identify the idea of minority influence creating social change. + A strength of the minority influence explanation for social change is
change that there’s research support for normative influences.
- Drawing attention: making a problem known by providing social proof of the problem. Nolan et al (2008) investigated whether social influence processes
led to a reduction in energy consumption in a community.
- Consistency: minorities must display consistency of message and intent over time and
between people. They hung messages on the front doors of houses in San Diego
every week for a month. The key message was that ‘most residents
- Deeper processing: attention to the issue meant that many people who had just were trying to reduce their energy usage’. As a control, some
accepted the social norm began to think about the unjustness of it. residents had a message that asked them to save energy (with no
reference to other people’s behaviour).
- Augmentation principle: if a person performs an action when there are known
constraints, their motive for acting must be stronger. They found significant decreases in energy in the first group.
- Snowball effect - a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and This is a strength because it shows that conformity can lead to
increasingly becomes larger - starting with a small group of people supporting an idea social change through the operation of normative social influence.
and gradually more and more people are supportive.
- Social cryptomnesia - people have a memory that social change has occurred but don’t
remember how it happened - the new attitude becomes an integral part of the society’s
culture and the source of the minority influence that led to the social change is forgotten.
- A weakness of the minority influence explanation for social change
is that minority influence is only indirectly effective.
When social change happens, it happens slowly, so this questions
whether minorities actually have much of an influence.
Charlan Nemeth (1986) argues that the effects of minority
influence are likely to be mostly indirect and delayed. Indirect
because the majority is influenced only on matters related to the
issues at hand (and obvious and relevant to them at the time)
instead of the central issue itself. Delayed because the effects may
not be seen for some time.
This is a limitation of using minority influence to explain social
change because it shows that its effects are fragile and its role in
social influence is therefore limited.
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