Minority Influence On Minorities

One person has little influence on a larger group, which can mean strangers feel that they are unable to influence others. The social cost of holding a view that is different from that of the majority is relatively high, this means minorities often hold their views more strongly. Sometimes this is unavoidable, this can mean that minorities stay with their opinions which makes their viewpoint seem stronger. This can become a problem because if minorities never take the chance to change the majority 's thinking there would be no social change. When society adopts a new belief or way of behaving based on the idea that, if an individual is exposed to a persuasive argument under certain conditions, they may change their views to match those of the minority. In this respect, power of numbers is important – the majority have the power to reward and punish with approval and disapproval. And because of this there is pressure on minorities to conform.
Moscovici (1969) showed that people would conform to an incorrect answer from a minority, as long as they were consistent in their …show more content…
According to their three hypotheses they first predicted, that groups given solve set instructions should be able to perform Information sampling and an informed minority be more likely to focus on critical information and to select the guilty suspect than groups given judge set instructions. For this study, 352 participants were assigned to 88 separate groups. Each group contained four people, with each group kept equal within the experimental conditions. The article does not state the demographics of their