Social Influence and Social Change PDF

Social influence and social change **Key terms:** **Social influence:** The process by which individuals and groups change each other\'s attitudes and behaviours. Includes conformity, obedience and minority influence. **Social change:** This occurs when whole societies, rather than just individ...

Social influence and social change **Key terms:** **Social influence:** The process by which individuals and groups change each other\'s attitudes and behaviours. Includes conformity, obedience and minority influence. **Social change:** This occurs when whole societies, rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes, beliefs and ways of doing things. Examples include accepting that the Earth orbits the Sun, women\'s suffrage, gay rights and environmental issues. **Social change:** - **Lessons from minority influence research:** Let\'s consider the steps in how minority social influence creates social change by looking at a real-world example-the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. 1. Drawing attention through social proof: In the 1950s, black and white segregation applied to all parts of America. There were black neighbourhoods and, in the southern states of America, places such as certain schools and restaurants were exclusive to whites. The civil rights marches of this period drew attention to this situation, providing social proof of the problem. 2. Consistency: Civil rights activists represented a minority of the American population, but their position remained consistent. Millions of people took part in many marches over several years, always presenting the same non-aggressive messages. 3. Deeper processing of the issue: The activism meant that many people who had simply accepted the status quo began to think deeply about the unjustness of it. 4. The augmentation principle: Individuals risked their lives numerous times. For example, the \'freedom riders\' were mixed ethnic groups who boarded buses in the south, challenging racial segregation of transport. Many freedom riders were beaten. This personal risk indicates a strong belief and reinforces (or augments) their message. 5. The snowball effect: Activists (e.g., Martin Luther King) gradually got the attention of the US government. More and more people backed the minority position. In 1964 the US Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination, marking a change from minority to majority support for civil rights. 6. Social cryptomnesia (people have a memory that change has occurred but don\'t remember how it happened): Social change clearly did come about so the south is quite a different place now. But some people have no memory (cryptoamnesia) of the events that led to that change - **Lessons from conformity research:** Earlier in this chapter you read about Solomon Asch\'s research. He highlighted the importance of dissent in one of his variations in which one confederate gave correct answers throughout the procedure. This broke the power of the majority, encouraging others to do likewise. Such dissent has the potential to ultimately lead to social change. A different approach is one used by environmental and health campaigns which exploit conformity processes by appealing to normative social influence. They do this by providing information about what other people are doing Examples include reducing litter by printing normative messages on litter bins (Bin it-others do), and preventing young people from taking up smoking (telling them that most other young people do not smoke). In other words, social change is encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing. - **Lessons from obedience research:** Milgram\'s research clearly demonstrates the importance of disobedient role models. In the variation where a confederate Teacher refuses to give shocks to the Learner, the rate of obedience in the genuine participants plummeted. Zimbardo (2007) suggested how obedience can be used to create social change through the process of gradual commitment. Once a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes much more difficult to resist a bigger one. People essentially drift\' into a new kind of behaviour. **Evaluation:** - **Research support for normative influences** One strength is that research has shown that social influence processes based on psychological research do work. Jessica Nolan et al. (2008) aimed to see if they could change people\'s energy- use habits. The researchers hung messages on the front doors of houses in San Diego, California every week for one month. The key message was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. As a control, some residents had a different message that just asked them to save energy but made no reference to other people\'s behaviour. There were significant decreases in energy usage in the first group compared to the second. This shows that conformity (majority influence) can lead to social change through the operation of normative social influence, Le. It is a valid explanation. - **Counterpoint** However, some studies show that people\'s behaviour is not always changed through exposing them to social norms. Foxcroft et al. (2015) reviewed social norms interventions as part of the gold standard Cochrane Collaboration. This review included 70 studies where the social norms approach was used to reduce student alcohol use. The researchers found only a small reduction in drinking quantity and no effect on drinking frequency Therefore, it seems that using normative influence does not always produce long-term social change. - **Minority influence explains change** Another strength is that psychologists can explain how minority influence brings about social change. Nemeth (2009) claims social change is due to the type of thinking that minorities inspire. When people consider minority arguments, they engage in divergent thinking. This type of thinking is broad rather than narrow, in which the thinker actively searches for information and weighs up more options. Nemeth argues this leads to better decisions and more creative solutions to social issues. This shows why dissenting minorities are valuable - they stimulate new Ideas and open minds in a way that majorities cannot. - **Role of deeper processing** One limitation is that deeper processing may not play a role in how minorities bring about social change. Some people are supposedly converted because they think more deeply about the minority\'s views. Mackle (1987) disagrees and presents evidence that it is majority influence that may create deeper processing if you do not share their views. This is because we like to believe that other people share our views and think in the same ways as us. When we find that a majority believes something different, then we are forced to think long and hard about their arguments and reasoning. This means that a central element of minority influence has been challenged, casting doubt on its validity as an explanation of social change. - **Evaluation eXtra - Barriers to social change** The research on this spread provides a lot of practical advice useful to a minority wanting to influence majority opinion or behaviour (e.g., the importance of consistency). However, according to Nadia Bashir et al. (2013), the fact is that people still resist social change. For example, Bashir et al. found that their participants were less likely to behave in environmentally-friendly ways because they did not want to be associated with stereotypical and minority environmentalists. They described environmental activists in negative ways (eg, tree-huggers). Despite this resistance, the researchers were still able to suggest ways in which minorities can overcome barriers to social change.