Social Influence- includes conformity, obedience and minority influences

Social change – whole societies adopt new attitudes, beliefs and behaviours e.g. acceptance of gay marriage

 

Minority influence in social change?

Minority influence incurs social change over time by altering attitudes and behaviour – involves internalisation (true conformity) – therefore long lasting

Majority influence in social change?

Majority influence then maintains the new social order (keep things the way they are) until a new majority emerges to repeat the process. Slowness of social change through minority influence.

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Processes involved in social change?

Attention – attracting attention to the minority group draws attention to the views they are addressing by doing things such as: rallies, protests, marches, strikes, etc…

Consistency/Persistence – minority arguments can easily be dismissed and rejected, however, if the minority is:

• Consistent – doing the same thing again and again

• Persistent – doing it to the same standard each time

• Position or paints raised are taken more seriously

Augmentation – minorities frequently suffer for their views at the hands of the majority (even if its unintentional). Their position may be reinforced because they’re willing to make personal sacrifices to bring about social change

 

Evaluation

One limitation minority influence is that its only indirectly effective. Nemeth (1986) argues that minority influence is indirect and delayed. The effects of the minority take a long time and the effects of social change may not occur for a long time. This is a limitation because using minority influence as an explanation for social change has a limited use in trying to understand the process – there are other key factors involved, e.g, politics and social norms. Therefore, this means that using the minority as an explanation for social change is limited and delayed, and other key social factors should be considered.

 

Another limitation is that social change research has methodological issues. The explanations of social influence and social change rely heavily on the work of Asch, Milgram and Moscovici. All of the research carried out by these psychologists can be evaluated due to their use of lab experiments + artificial = external validity issues.  This is a limitation for understanding social change because many variables, like political motives and social norms, have not been considered. Therefore, this means that there is limited real life application of the social change research due to the artificial behaviours from such research that are used to explain social change behaviours.