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minority influence essay plan
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This document includes an essay plan grid for the subtopic minority influence in the A level Psychology social influence topic
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AO1 AO3Minority
influence - What does a minority group have to do to influence the majority:
remain consistent, show flexibility, show commitment to the
cause.
Consistency A strength of the explanation for minority influence is that there’s research support for consistency.
- This can be both consistency over time (diachronic consistency)
and between people in the minority (synchronic consistency). Moscovici et al’s study showed that a consistent minority opinion had a greater effect on other people than
an inconsistent opinion.
Wood et al (1994) carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who
were seen as being consistent were more influential.
Suggests that consistency is a major factor in minority influence.
Commitment A weakness of the explanation for minority influence is that supporting studies, such as Moscovici’s,
- Sometimes minorities engage in quite extreme activities to draw involve artificial tasks, such as identifying the colour of a slide.
attention to their views.
- It’s important that these extreme activities present some risk to The research is therefore far removed from how minorities attempt to change the behaviour of majorities
the minority because this shows greater commitment. in real life. Such as in jury decision making, the outcomes are much more important.
- Majority group members then pay even more attention.
- This is called the augmentation principle. This means that findings of minority influence studies such as Moscovic’s are lacking in external validity
and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-life situations.
Flexibility A weakness of the explanation for minority influence is that research studies are limited in real world
- Members of the minority need to be prepared to adapt their point applications.
of view and accept reasonable and valid counter arguments.
- The key is to strike a balance between consistency and flexibility. Research studies usually make a clear distinction between the majority and minority, but real-life
situations are much more complicated than this. There’s more involved in the difference between a
minority and majority than just numbers. E.g. majorities usually have a lot more power and status.
Therefore, the findings from these research studies can’t be generalised to all real world situations and
lack external validity, which reduces how useful the explanations of minority influence can be.
Snowballing
- Once the minority begins to persuade people to their way of
thinking, a snowball effect begins to happen.
- This means that more and more people adopt the minority
opinion, until gradually the minority becomes the majority.
- The people who haven’t changed their opinion are the minority
now, and they will often conform to the majority view as a result
of group pressures.
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