Majority and Minority Influence

12 Key excerpts on "Majority and Minority Influence"

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  eBook - PDF

  The SAGE Handbook of Social Psychology

  Concise Student Edition

  • Michael A Hogg, Joel Cooper, Michael A Hogg, Joel Cooper(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Summary and concluding remarks This chapter has summarized research examining a number of social-influence processes that aim either to control and maintain the group norm (majority influence and obedience to authority) or to change the group norm (minority influence). In dividing these processes into social control and social change, we again emphasize that this distinc-tion reflects the source of motives to influence other people and not the outcomes of influence. As this review shows, both majorities and minorities can bring about change in people’s attitudes, albeit under different circumstances. We have taken a chronological approach that reflects the progression of research through three distinct stages; studies examining exclusively majority or minority influence and, finally, research that examines both Majority and Minority Influence within the same paradigm. These chronological stages also reflect con-trasting methodological and theoretical differences. For example, research on majority influence was strongly influenced by the functionalist model with its empha-sis on psychological dependency as the explanatory variable. By contrast, research on minority influence was framed within an attribution approach, with influ-ence being determined by the minority’s behavioral style (in particular, consistency). Finally, research examining both Majority and Minority Influence has been conducted within the social-ognition tradition with emphasis upon the role of information-processing strategies upon social influence. The difference in research foci has, no doubt, affected the style of research and the causal models that they inspire. Early research on majority and, in particular, minority influence was inspired by real-life issues (see, for example, the opening pages of Moscovici and Nemeth, 1974), and these concerns contributed to the development of the research pro-gram.

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  Encyclopedia of Social Psychology

  • Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Roy Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  For instance, a particularly powerful majority group might be extremely resistant to the minority view no matter how strong the minor-ity case might be. However, the minority may still influence the majority through indirect routes. For instance, minority members may continuously remind the majority of the importance or implications of the 580 ——— Minority Social Influence group’s task or decision, which may encourage members of the majority to think more critically about their views or delay a final decision until they seek more information. If majority members are willing to collect more information, they may be more willing to consider the details of the minority’s viewpoint. Another important factor in minority social influ-ence is the relationship between the minority and majority in the group at the time that a disagree-ment occurs. If the members of the minority have established relationships or shared experiences with members of the majority, then attempts at minority influence may be more successful. For example, the minority members might have agreed with majority members in previous tasks or decisions. As a result, majority members might be more welcoming of an opposing view from minority members who have established a positive relationship with the majority in the past. Outcomes of Minority Influence In general, minority social influence may differ from majority influence in both the degree and kind of out-comes of their strategies. The social influence that is elicited by a minority group is usually more private and indirect than is influence by a majority group. In addition, the effects of minority influence may not appear immediately. However, minority influence may change majority group members’ private beliefs, which can lead to changes in outward behavior later. Minority social influence also may alter the group’s general view on issues that are indirectly related to the task or decision at hand.

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  Majority and Minority Influence

  Societal Meaning and Cognitive Elaboration

  • Stamos Papastamou, Antonis Gardikiotis, Gerasimos Prodromitis(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  minority was the prime. Apparently, the mere attribution of majority status triggers an automatic and positive initial dispositional response.

  p.48 Unpacking majority influence

  It should be understood that the majority’s advantage is not absolute, its privilege is not always honoured, and the norms of ‘proper’ behaviour are not always followed. Majorities are often met with stiff resistance and little overt change on the part of their influence targets. A voluminous research literature attests that the leader of a group, who presumably represents the majority of group members’ beliefs, is not always followed, and may be unceremoniously dumped, even by those whose loyalty might otherwise be taken for granted (Alabastro, Rast, Lac, Hogg, & Crano, 2013; Hogg, 2012, 2013; Rast, Hogg, & Tomory, 2015). In other contexts, the changes that the majority induces are ephemeral and quickly reversed. In yet other instances, the majority appears to have a persistent effect on the beliefs and actions of its targets. To understand social influence, then, which more often than not refers to majority influence, it is essential to appreciate the factors responsible for the variable outcomes of majority influence efforts beyond the usual shibboleths of brute force, threats, and continuous, intense surveillance, because studies of majority influence often are conducted in ways that negate even the possibility of the majority applying retribution or maintaining surveillance over its potential influence targets.

  Threats and surveillance: the ‘brute force’ view

  Surprisingly, the processes responsible for the variable outcomes of majority influence, its successes and failures, are under-studied in social psychology. It is true that majority influence has come to be viewed as considerably less interesting than minority influence, as it was characterized as involving the rather mundane processes of coercion and surveillance. As will be shown, however, this has been revealed as a shortsighted view. Majority-induced change was thought to result in little cognitive readjustment and thus ultimately to involve only short-term compliance rather than processes of cognitive reorganization and internalization, which may result ultimately in long-term behaviour change. Although compliance and internalization have been studied at least since the 1950s, the focus on force and threats as the principal tools of the majority has not changed much in the past half-century (Kelman, 1958). The stress on minority influence, on the other hand, was carried forward by a need to understand the processes by which an individual or group with little or no apparent power could move the majority to its way of thinking.

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  The Science of Social Influence

  Advances and Future Progress

  • Anthony R. Pratkanis(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Objective consensus approaches add to this that majority messages are also more likely to be seen as credible and relevant, and thus elicit more positive thoughts and more systematic processing. Majority compared to minority messages thus have both more normative and more informational influence. MINORITY INFLUENCE 251 Conversion Theory Quite in contrast to the social impact and objective consensus perspectives, Moscovici’s (1980) conversion theory proposes that majority and minority influ- ence is the result of two separate processes leading to different levels of public and private influence. Majority influence leads to a social comparison process: When confronted with majority influence, individuals compare their own response with that of the majority without considering, in detail, the majority’s message. Majority influence thus entails public compliance with little private change. Majorities per- suade through threats of censure and ostracism. The social pressure they bring to bear to compel members to acquiesce to the will of the group can be formidable, but it is temporary. When majority surveillance is relaxed, the pressure is off, and the old belief or behavior returns because nothing but appearances are changed by the normative social pressure of the majority (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Minority influence, on the other hand, leads to a validation process: Because of their distinctiveness, minorities lead individuals to engage in cognitive process- ing of the message in order to understand the minority’s position. This can lead to conversion behaviour – “a subtle process of perceptual or cognitive modification by which a person gives up his/her usual response in order to adopt another view or response, without necessarily being aware of the change or forced to make it” (Moscovici & Personnaz, 1980; p. 271). Minority influence is thus seen as present, but change in the direction advocated by the minority was expected only after a delay.

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  Social Groups in Action and Interaction

  2nd Edition

  • Charles Stangor(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Results showed that when the participants thought that the unusual response (for instance, “god” rather than “dog”) was only given by a minority of one individual in the group, rather than a majority of three individuals, they subsequently answered more of the new word strings using novel solutions, such as finding words made backward or using a random order of the letters. This outcome is predicted from the assumption that behavior that comes from minority groups leads individuals to think about the behaviors more carefully, in comparison to the same behaviors performed by majority group members. This, along with other research showing similar findings, was interpreted by Nemeth and Kwan as indicating that messages that come from minority groups can produce innovative, creative thinking in majority group members.

  COMPARING Majority and Minority Influence

  Although it is now clear that conformity can occur to either majorities or minorities, there is nevertheless disagreement among researchers about whether it is necessary to consider the conformity that results from Majority and Minority Influence as representing fundamentally different processes, or whether it is more accurate to consider conformity as conformity, regardless of whether it is initiated by a majority or a minority.

  Single-Process Approaches

  The principle of parsimony (that is, preferring the simplest possible explanation) suggests that, if possible, we should assume that Majority and Minority Influence are caused by the same underlying factors. This is the prediction of the single-process approach, which assumes that the situations that produce conformity to majorities and minorities are the same (Chaiken & Stangor, 1987; Kruglanski & Mackie, 1990; Latané, 1981; Tanford & Penrod, 1984).

  Several theorists have proposed mathematical models designed to summarize the impact of individuals on conformity based on the assumption that influence is influence, regardless of its source (Tanford & Penrod, 1984). We have already considered one of these approaches—social impact theory—in our prior discussion (Latané, 1981; Wolf, 1987). According to social impact theory, conformity depends on three separate variables: S (the strength of the majority, such as its status and expertise), I (the physical closeness or immediacy of the majority to the person or persons being influenced), and N

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  Group Dynamics

  • Donelson Forsyth(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  However, social influence also flows from the individual to the group. If the group is to meet new challenges and improve over time, it must recognize and accept ideas that conflict with the status quo. In Twelve Angry Men , the lone minority held his ground, offered reasons for his views, and he pre-vailed. Whereas majority influence increases the consensus within the group, minority influence sustains individuality and innovation. In this chapter, we consider the nature of this give-and-take between majorities and minorities and the implications of this influence process for understanding how juries make their decisions (Levine & Prislin, 2013; Levine & Tindale, 2015). 7 -1 M A J O R I T Y I N F L U E N C E : T H E P O W E R O F T H E M A N Y Groups offer their members many advantages over a solitary existence, but these advantages come at a cost. The jurors sought to influence the other jur-ors, but all the while the jury was influencing them: It swayed their judgments, favored one interpreta-tion of reality over another, and encouraged certain behaviors while discouraging others. When the group first polled the members, several were uncer-tain but they voted guilty to go along with others. They had to make a choice between alternatives, and they chose the alternative favored by the majority of the others even though that choice did not coincide with their own personal preferences. They gave more weight to social information — the majority ’ s opinion — than they gave to personal preferences. They displayed conformity (Claidière & Whiten, 2012). 7-1a Conformity and Independence When do people conform? Muzafer Sherif verified that group members modify their judgments so that they match those of others in their groups (1936; see chapter 6). Theodore Newcomb ’ s study of Benning-ton students showed that members of a group will gradually take as their own the group ’ s position on political and social issues (1943; see chapter 2).

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  Group Processes

  • John M. Levine(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Levine & Thompson, 1996 ).

  Social psychological research on majority/minority disagreement has focused primarily on three of these tactics—majority influence, minority influence, and majority rejection of minorities. In the following sections, we review and synthesize theoretical and empirical work on Majority and Minority Influence (for a review of majority rejection of minorities, see Levine & Kerr, 2007 ). We divide our discussion into (a) early work on majority influence encompassing Asch’s (1951 , 1952 , 1956 ) classic studies and subsequent research based on the “dependence” perspective (e.g., Festinger, 1950 ; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955 ) and (b) later work on both Majority and Minority Influence stimulated by Moscovici’s (1976) “conflict” analysis.

  Maintaining the Status Quo: Majority Influence

  Asch's Studies

  Systematic research on majority influence began with Solomon Asch’s ground-breaking research (1951, 1952, 1956). In these studies, groups of seven to nine members were asked to make perceptual judgments that involved matching the length of a standard line against three comparison lines. Each group contained one naïve participant who answered next to last and several confederates who gave unanimously incorrect answers on many of the trials. The line- matching task was very easy, as indicated by the fact that control participants (who answered alone with no social pressure) very rarely gave incorrect answers. Nonetheless, Asch (1956) found that approximately one-third of participants’ total responses on critical trials involved yielding to the erroneous majority. Although the conformity that Asch found may seem striking, it must be interpreted in the context of his findings that approximately two-thirds of participants’ total responses were correct and almost one-fourth of participants never yielded to group pressure. Interestingly, in spite of this mixed picture, Asch’s results are often characterized as providing strong and unequivocal evidence that people conform to group pressure (see Friend, Rafferty, & Bramel, 1990 ). This is ironic, given that Asch did not believe that people invariably go along with others’ views and was not surprised to find substantial independence in his studies (see Levine, 1999

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  Minority Influence and Innovation

  Antecedents, Processes and Consequences

  • Robin Martin, Miles Hewstone(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Our studies show that consensus information does impact on social-influence processes but in ways that current models have difficulty in fully explaining (see also Erb et al., 2006). Consensus information is important to majority influence, but primarily in showing that the majority group contains more than 50% of the population. By contrast, being numerically small is an advantage to a minority as it increases perceptions of being consistent, committed and confident, as Moscovici (1976) argued, and this can instigate a systematic evaluation of the minority’s arguments.

  All three experiments that used percentages to define group consensus supported the majority-source hypothesis, showing that a majority had more influence than a minority irrespective of the level of consensus. What is interesting is that the majority effect occurred even when the consensus difference between the groups was very small (52% vs. 48%). Thus a difference of only 4% was sufficient to lead to a reliable difference in influence.

  Consensus information and social influence

  The content analysis of newspaper headlines revealed some interesting differences in majority and minority representation. Two points are relevant here: first, consensus adjectives are frequently used to convey consensus information about social groups. Second, a close inspection of consensus adjectives showed that whereas majority adjectives refer to large and small majorities (i.e., cover the whole range of the consensus continuum), minority adjectives refer only to small minorities (i.e., cover only the lowest end of the continuum).

  Following the findings of content analysis, we experimentally investigated the effect of different types of consensus information on social influence and found that when group consensus is defined in terms of consensus adjectives (e.g., ‘large’ or ‘small’ majority or minority), then the ‘large’ sources had more influence than the ‘small’ sources irrespective of source status (i.e., majority or minority status). When group consensus is defined in terms of numerical support in percentages (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) majority source was more influential than the minority irrespective of level of group consensus. Percentage information about a group seems to focus attention on source status, a context that is beneficial to majority status. The majority was more influential: (a) when source label (i.e., ‘majority’) and consensus percentages were provided, and (b) when only consensus percentages were given. When only source labels were employed (i.e., ‘majority’ vs. ‘minority’) no difference was observed between majority and minority groups. These findings underlined the importance of expressing consensus in terms of percentages for majority influence.

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  Identity in Modern Society

  A Social Psychological Perspective

  • Bernd Simon(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  For instance, in most societies, women would then be considered a (social) minority and men a (social) majority. Similarly, during the rule of the apart-heid regime in South Africa, Whites would have been considered a majority and Blacks a minority, even though the former group was numerically smaller than the latter (Tajfel, 1978c). In this chapter, I start from a numerical definition of minority and majority membership. This approach is in line with the bulk of research on minority–majority relations conducted by experimental social psychologists (e.g. Brewer, 1998; Simon et al., 2001). Also, in real life, numerical asymmet-ries often, though not necessarily, co-vary with status or power asymmetries such that the numerical minority is also a low-status or relatively powerless group and the numerical majority a high-status or relatively powerful group. This appears to be the case especially in democratic societies with their ideological emphasis on majority rule (Lijphart, 1977, 1984; see also Sachdev & Bourhis, 1984; Sherif, 1966). However, this correlation also implies that the effects of relative group size and status or power are often confounded in real life. Consequently, although relative group size constitutes the central inde-pendent variable in the research discussed in this chapter, I will also explore the role of status and power asymmetries in minority–majority relations. My main aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that membership in a minority group and membership in a majority group each constitutes a distinct social psychological situation for the particular group member and that the notion of identity helps us to better understand a variety of differential cognitive, affective and behavioural reactions which this situation elicits from minority and majority members.

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  Psychology

  Selected Papers

  • Gina Rossi(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  Rather, minority sources (as compared to majority sources) elicit a different focus of thinking: Minority communication seems to widen the focus of the ad-dressee whereas majority communication narrows the focus. Alternatives to social influence models that assume two different modes of processing have proposed a single modus at op-eration irrespective of the minority versus majority status of the communicator. 3.2.2 Single-process accounts Single process accounts assume a general influence process for both minority and majority sources (Doms & van Avermaet, 1980; Latané & Wolf, 1981; Tanford & Penrod, 1984). With their social impact model, Latané and Wolf (1981) criticized that minority and majority influ-ence could not be compared validly in many studies to that date, because the direction of in-fluence was either from an active majority to a passive minority or vice versa and was often confounded with power of the source. They proposed that the influence of both sources should instead be studied simultaneously and be defined merely by their numerical differ-ences. As a result, consensus is disentangled from power and other factors that may affect level of influence. The remaining difference in support for a topic can be estimated as a func-tion of numerical group size. Hence, a unitary influence by majorities as well as minorities is predicted by three factors: strength, closeness, and size of a group (Latané & Wolf, 1981). A study on social impact in electronic groups (Latané & L’Herrou, 1996), investigated how spatial relations between people affect the spread of influence and maintenance of diversity. It showed that complex geometries (with clustering in families, etc.) and boundaries to communications (like rivers, walls etc.) promote influence by minorities, whereas open social networks without spatial boundaries foster larger majority influence.

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  Social Influence Network Theory

  A Sociological Examination of Small Group Dynamics

  • Noah E. Friedkin, Eugene C. Johnsen(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This body of work is controversial and unsettled (Baron, Kerr, and Miller 1992; Cramer 1975; Doms 1984; Doms and Avermaet 1980; Kelvin 1979; Latan´ e and Wolf 1981; Levine 1989; Mackie 1987; Martin 1998; Martin and Hew- stone 2001; Nemeth 1975; Sorrentino, King, and Leo 1980; Wood et al. 1994). Moscovici has argued that the main basis of majority influence is compliance (change of publicly displayed attitude without any change of the privately held attitude on an issue) and that the main basis of minor- ity influence is conversion (change of privately held attitudes), and he has argued that conversion is a more enduring change than compliance. The argument rests on the following assumption: since the credibility of a minority is not based on numerical superiority, it is more likely to be based on argumentation and persuasion. However, minorities may coerce an accommodation to their positions when consensus is required or strongly desired and they may hold group consensus hostage to their spe- cial interests and intransigence. It may be overly generous to refer to such coercion as “behavioral consistency” as is often done in the literature on minority influence. Furthermore, a majority’s influence may be based on sound arguments or broadly shared interests; indeed, majorities may form on particular positions because of the merits of those positions relative to alternatives (although this was not the case in the Asch experiments). 8.3 Findings on Naturally Occurring Factions Our experiments provided some naturally occurring instances of factions. Denoting the initial and equilibrium attitudes of a faction’s members by the subvectors y (1, f ) and y (∞, f ) , respectively, three types of factions may be discriminated: fixed, shifted, and broken.

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  Encyclopedia of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations

  • John M Levine, Michael A. Hogg, John M. Levine, Michael Hogg(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  approach to social influence, which equated influence with confor-mity. He rejected the assumption underlying much of U.S. research at the time that influence can be reduced to change that individuals or minorities undergo under pressure from a group. Moscovici argued that influence also included change in the opposite direction. From innovators in science to revolutionaries in politics, history abounds with examples of minorities that prevailed in their opposition to a majority. According to Moscovici’s “genetic” model of minority influence, numerical minorities create conflict within a group at two levels: At the cogni-tive level, they question the established (majority) worldview; at the social level, they threaten inter-personal relationships. Initially, people try to resolve the conflict by attributing the minority position to undesirable psychological characteris-tics (e.g., deviance, insanity, naïveté). However, if the minority continues to advocate its position consistently, conveying commitment and certainty, its behavioral style may convince the majority to reconsider its initial reaction and adopt the minor-ity position as a valid alternative. In a revision of his initial model, Moscovici placed less emphasis on behavioral style and 581 Moscovici, Serge elaborated on the ways that people resolve con-flict caused by the dissenting minority. According to his conflict theory, the dissenting minority trig-gers a validation process through which people try to understand the minority position and examine their own position. This thorough examination of the minority position may cause people to con-vert. However, to avoid being associated with a minority, they are likely to keep their conversion private. In contrast, when exposed to majority influence, people are primarily concerned with potentially negative consequences of their devia-tion from the majority. They engage in the com-parison process, through which they try to fit in with the majority.

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