Take our 5-minute anger test to find out if you're angry! But there also are examples of numerical, non-normative minorities who, while resisting influence from the majority, do not seek social change (e.g., Mennonites in several countries in North and South America). eds. To what extent are people controlled by their roles in society? 74, 14371450. The acts of claiming and developing land and defending it against the forces of nature all constituted rites of passage that transformed foreigners into Americans. One should never waste a good crisis. Despite his susceptibility to eugenics and racial theories of supremacy, Roosevelt also offers us a way forward. (1991). Levine, J. M., and Kaarbo, J. They map on the reasons discussed earlier for strapping minority influence research in the Procrustean bed of the cognitive processing approach, which, along with serious logistic challenges, effectively eliminated time as a variable in this line of research. (2000). (1996). (1989). Self-definition, defensive processing, and influence: The normative impact of majority and minority groups. This is not to say that any single influence strategy is associated with any particular single motive; however, the same strategy may be employed differently in service of different motives. Vol. ^Social influence research has traditionally assumed that a motive for social acceptance underlies yielding to social influence (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955), not exerting social influence. What kind of social influence can. Over time, as members evaluate a minority view, they may internalize it - adopting it as their own opinion through a process known as conversion. London: Academic Press. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.86.6.1191, De Groeve, B., and Rosenfeld, D. L. (2022). Discover your Freudian personality type with our Fixation Test. have strong norms about how people should behave. About As a counterbalance to research on the informational value of minority advocacy, several lines of research have emphasized the role of social identity and the resultant normative pressures in determining reactions to minority influence, which reactions expand beyond attitudinal shifts to include group-categorization (e.g., Abrams and Hogg, 1990; David and Turner, 2001) and self-categorization (e.g., Wood et al., 1996). Contact Us Vol. At what point in time does it become public and sufficiently substantial to change social relations and social structure within a group? And even if the Census Bureaus categories reinforce the racial boundaries that too often divide American society, these categories are also starting to show signs of their mutability. Because gains are experienced less intensely than the comparable losses (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), changes away from the minority position should elicit positive reactions that are weaker than negative reactions to changes away from the majority positions. J. Pers. What explains the effectiveness of these approaches? To the extent that acceptance means a state of cognitive merging with a group (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), it cannot be satisfied through acquiescence, which implies affiliation, not integration, with others. J. Soc. Klandermans, B. Group Processes. Course Hero is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university. Rather, it has focused dominantly on the cognitive processes and attitudinal change in response to a minority advocacy or minority mere presence, and, to a lesser degree, to the role of minority influence in decision-making and task groups. Hardin, C. D., and Higgins, E. T. (1996). More recently, social change has been examined as a function of two factors: Indirect minority influence, defined as attitudinal change on culturally relevant issues different from but related to the focal issue of minority advocacy, and cultural drift, defined as mistakes in copying culturally relevant attributes due to small errors in the learning and memory processes. Shared reality: How social verification makes the subjective objective, in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition. 51, 629636. Moscovici, S. (1976). According to the ________ technique, one approach could be to first ask people if they would be willing to wear a button that says, "Adopt a dog today," and then a couple of weeks later ask them if they would be willing to adopt a dog themselves. There is no frontier anymore, but the grind of modern capitalism is just as stern a forge for fashioning American identity. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. This unidirectional conceptualization postulated influence as flowing exclusively from a majority to a minority. From majority to minority and vice versa: The asymmetrical effects of losing and gaining majority position within a group. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.68.1.5. Studies in self-categorization and minority conversion: Is being a member of the out-group an advantage? A., Busceme, S., and Blackstone, T. (1994). Psychol. S. Harkins, K. D. Williams, and J. M. Burger (New York: Oxford University Press), 317337. Those who are non-normative and few originate every social change, seeking to alter the mechanisms within the social structure, including social relations and social organization. A., and Mugny, G. (1996). Mere consensus effects in minority and majority influence, in Group Consensus and Minority Influence: Implications for Innovation. 93, 2332. J. M. Levine (New York: Psychology Press), 135163. Jury trials: psychology and law, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. And there is precious little evidence of real solidarity among Americas diverse minority ethnic groups. Struggle to keep conversations alive? The reasons for this development are complex. Soc. eds. I am not arguing that the Census Bureau should stop collecting this valuable data, la Frances farcical attempt to be secular and race blind. doi: 10.1037/h0046408. Minorities effect social change over time, winning a competition in social influence, which is exerted in service of various motives. Therefore, the minority is unable to exert a normative influence on other members. What causes us to obey to authority figures such as police, teachers and 2023 Psychologist World. David, B., and Turner, J. C. (2001). Yet, most studies on social influence, including minority influence, are one-time affairs that examine the effects of single appeals or single group encounters at a discrete point in time. Yet, maturity appears to come at the expense of vigor. L. Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press), 309367. Social Influence and Social Change. The proposed agenda focuses on time, interactive (minority majority), and motivated influence as critical explanatory variables to address in the next phase of research on minority influence in the pursuit of social change. As an illustration of the epistemic value of the time perspective approach to understanding the consequences of successful minority influence, and a test of the above-mentioned Hypothesis 1, consider a longitudinal study that examined reactions of a minority faction within a group who successfully converted a sufficient number of majority members to its position to effectively turn themselves into a new majority and ipso facto, the former majority into a new minority (Prislin and Christensen, 2005b, Study 2). This form of influence has been used effectively by civil rights movements throughout the 20th Century to shape public opinion. Martin, R., and Hewstone, M. (2008). Psychol. These circumstances cannot be easily organized in a unifying model within either the information processing (persuasion) framework (but see Martin and Hewstone, 2008) or the interacting group framework, much less under an omnibus framework. This means that she is most likely to comply with which of the following requests? There is likely no better contemporary example of the power of minorities to instigate social change than a growing recognition of the urgent need for the humankind to address the cause and impacts of climate change. Two lines of research: One on group decision-making, and another on the impact that newcomers to groups make, provide alternative approaches to the study of minority influence.4 Within these lines of research, minority influence is addressed in the context of interacting groups, with minority and majority positions publicly advocated and hence, memberships in minority and majority factions actively experienced. Minority Influence and Social Change: Role & Examples The effects of social change within a group on membership preferences: to leave or not to leave. eds. P. A. van Lange, E. T. Higgins, and A. W. Kruglanski (New York: Guilford Press), 181201. As a majority view gained the support of more members, individuals holding an opposite viewpoint were less able to influence the group. The Power of Minorities. (1998). Levine, J. M., and Prislin, R. (2013). 6. Psychol. Terrorism as a tactic of minority influence, in Coping With Minority Status: Responses to Exclusion and Inclusion. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.115.3.323, Wood, W., Pool, G. J., Leck, K., and Purvis, D. (1996). 3. Psychol. 86, 11911201. Prislin, R., and Christensen, P. N. (2009). change. This dynamic aspect of social influence was recognized in the early theorizing of Moscovici (1976), as well as in the subsequent consideration of minority influence in the intergroup context by Mugny (1982) that includes the power agent (typically normative majority) and the population (typically the target of both minority and majority influence). Despite notable growth in the non-White eligible voter population, non-Hispanic White voters still made up the large majority (67%) of the U.S. electorate in people should benefit those who benefit them. J. Exp. 22, 177189. (2011). Cyberbullying has become more prevalent with increasing technological advances in our society. Although these actions may include members of both minority groups who are typically disadvantaged and members of majority groups who are typically advantaged, it is almost invariably the former who initiate social actions. Group conversion versus group expansion as modes of change in majority and minority positions: All losses hurt but only some gains gratify. (2007). People who identify as white hold disproportionate power and resources today, and this pernicious reality seems unlikely to change even if white people do become a 49 percent plurality in about two decades. The researchers found that when the confederate seated themselves, without guidance, at the head seat, other participants were more likely to agree with their suggestion of an amount of compensation than if they followed the experimenter's directions. Sci. Thus, immediately in the aftermath of social change whereby minorities become majorities and vice versa (minority majority), the former should react only mildly positively, and the latter should react intensely negatively, toward the group in which they switched positions. Moscovici, S. (1980). Rev. Glaser, T., Dickel, N., Liersch, B., Rees, J., Sssenbach, P., and Bohner, G. (2015). In what follows, the importance of these factors is discussed and illustrated by a few initial explorations. Soon to win the White House, Theodore Roosevelt found these developments alarming. ed. 117, 497529. Stoking fears of white decline reinforces the myth that this whiteness always included all who now identify with it as if the Irish had never been demonized, as if Italians had never endured discrimination, as if Jews had never been excluded. In contrast to these sources, those who were consistently rejected to remain in a minority, as well as those who lost social support to be turned from a majority to a minority (majority minority), lost much of their persuasive efficacy over time. Differential contributions of majority and minority influence. (1986). Minority Influence and Innovation: Antecedents, Processes, and Consequences. None of the proposed models, however, has been tested empirically outside of computational simulations. Even though it promoted the rights of a minority of the population, the movement helped to end public segregation based on race with the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Wood, W., Lundgren, S., Ouellette, J. Group Processes. Vol. (1974). Moscovici, S. (1994). V. C. Ottati, R. S. Scott, J. Edwards, F. B. Bryant, L. Heath, and D. C. OConnell, et al. Hence, the proposed agenda focuses on time, interactive, and motivated influence as critical explanatory variables to address in the next phase of research on minority influence in the pursuit of social change. WebPeople who hold a minority view tend to change the majority opinion through a. normative social influence. What began as a minority view becomes a majority view as morepeople adopt it. In government, lobbyists representing a minority such as a company, charity or trade body seek to influence the views of legislators by publishing research which supports the interests of that minority. In the group, confederates were instructed to misidentify the slides as being green, contrary to participants own observations. eds. 42, 2530. How do our infant relationships affect those we have as we grow older? Psychol. To ensure that only unique empirical studies were counted, care was taken not to double-count studies that were published in journals and later summarized in book chapters or vice versa. Latan, B., and Nowak, A. WebMAJORITY If the minority can get a few people to defect to their side, then this will often create a snowball effect in which more and more people will change their opinion. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.388. E. H. Witte and J. H. Davis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 191210. Demonstrability and social combination processes on mathematical intellective tasks. While standing firm, minorities must also convey a level of open-mindedness in acknowledging others positions to avoid being perceived as rigid (Papastamou and Mugny, 1985). Taking the number of published studies as a readily available, however imperfect, indicator of vigor, the findings are telling. How ingratiation techniques are used to persuade people. eds. Without considering time, some questions are never asked and important phenomena are poorly understood. Real-life exampleswhere minority influence affects the majoritywithin a group include: 1. WebThe study of minority influence has advanced considerably since the late 1960s when Moscovici's pioneering efforts brought the minority's role in the process of persuasion 37, 725746. In what appeared a vicious circle of influence failures, these sources became decreasingly convincing in their advocacy with increasingly negative feedback they received. Political systems, scientific paradigms, religious dogmas, art movements, and fashion styles are all changed by active minorities who successfully challenge the status quo and offer an alternative (Moscovici and Faucheux, 1972; Moscovici, 1976). Majority influence occurs when the beliefs held by the larger number of individuals in the current social group prevail. Bull. (1955). On the other hand, minorities motivated to be socially accepted need not necessarily seek converts to their position.5 Rather, they may pursue social change by advocating for tolerance. Minorities who accept rather than challenge the status quo, so long as they themselves are not challenged, are a minority within the minority world. His subsequent conversion theory (Moscovici, 1980) focused exclusively on cognitive processes underlying minority vs. majority influence and the resultant nature of attitudinal (not social!) Whereas such conversion is the condition sine qua non for a minority to become a majority, it also signals unreliability and ultimately, instability of the majority position. The newly established more inclusive group standard encompasses both minorities and majorities as constitutive elements of the group, representing a gain for the former at no cost for the latter. Terms of Use Minoritys success at effecting social change and ipso facto, majoritys failure to prevent it, should influence not only their reactions toward the group but also their capacity to further argue their positions. informational social influence because it happens when a person conforms to gain The daunting complexity of the social influence dynamics is challenging to capture in a formal model, much less empirical research. R. Martin and M. Hewstone (New York: Psychology Press), 285312. Shafer, E. S., and Prislin, R. (2011). Soc. Hewstone, M., and Martin, R. (2010). (1990). A) public compliance B) obedience to authority C) ideomotor action D) informational social influence Correct Answer: Access For Free Review Later A. Minority Opinion Law and Legal Definition | USLegal, Inc. This phenomenon, known as social cryptomnesia, often occurs when a person held negative views of the minority whose views they adopted. These were created by having a nave participant interact with a number of confederates, each of whom was trained to provide scripted responses during the course of the groups interaction. When first introduced, Moscovicis idea about the power of minorities to instigate change was very much a minority idea. Moscovici, S., and Prez, J. Vol. Changing majority and minority positions within a group vs. an aggregate. Sign Up. (eds.) This state of affairs is rather paradoxical given Moscovicis original theorizing and ultimately, most minorities goals. Itslike in the Milgramstudies in which people were less S. Moscovici, G. Mugny, and V. Avermaet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 113138. How the life changes caused by experiencing major events can affect stress levels. eds. (2011). Whereas most minorities seek social change, they do so for a variety of reasons that originate from a variety of disadvantageous social, economic, and psychological conditions. The dynamic nature of social influence is additionally evident in its multidirectionality, with multiple factions within a group competing to prevail. Home WebJenna_Cuthbertson Terms in this set (10) Minorities influence majority opinion primarily through informational social influence. Mackie, D. M. (1987). she will become even more committed to Romeo. At the same time, their behavior style invites an attributional analysis that forces a majority to consider the merits of the minoritys non-normative position. WebContends that in most studies comparing majority and minority influence, there is an emphasis on influence in the sense of prevailing. There was a gradual realization that the Anglo-Protestant orientation of whiteness was unlikely to sustain a dominant majority indefinitely. Revels in Groups: Dissent, Deviance, Difference, and Defiance. Since majorities are often unconcerned about what minorities think about them, minority influence is thus rarely based on normative social influence. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1095, Prislin, R., and Christensen, P. N. (2005a). J. Pers. Clark and Maass (1990) found that the size of the majority within a group can affect the ability of a minority to influence members. Also, the authors own line of research on group dynamics in the aftermath of social change could be added to this minority category in that its focus on group dynamics is underrepresented in minority influence research (Prislin, 2010; Prislin et al., 2017). Minority Influence (Psychology Definition) | Practical Psychology 53, 4152. Seeking conversion versus advocating tolerance in pursuit of social change. Even a revolutionary change progresses to its culminating tipping point after a period of build-up that requires time. Lest we succumb to the same trap, it is worth remembering that every social change, including those that turned disastrous for the world (e.g., Nazi movement), was originated by a minority. (2001). 1. Personal. 97, 811822. This socio-cognitive conflict may be resolved over time such that some majority members privately adopt the minority position. J. Pers. Rev. The confidence of a minority can also affect its ability to influence other members. Soc. Jung, J., Bramson, A., Crano, W. D., Page, S. E., and Miller, J. H. (2021). (eds.) There is no future in which white people disappear from America, but there is also no future in which the understanding of whiteness stays the same. (1979). a request to donate to a charitable organization. Teaching as social influence: empowering teachers to become agents of social change. Dynamics of change: Minority influence makes the world go around, in Minority Influence and Innovation: Antecedents, Processes and Consequences. Which leaves us with the persistent publish or perish culture that discourages high-stakes, time-consuming, logistically demanding, group-oriented research, especially if it is longitudinal. Prislin, R. (2010). Psychol. Moreover, the informational influence strategy may be combined differently with other strategies (e.g., procedural tools, threats, coalition-building) in service of a particular motive.