Minority Influence and Innovation

Antecedents, Processes and Consequences

Robin Martin, Miles Hewstone

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135232764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Social groups form an important part of our daily lives. Within these groups pressures exist which encourage the individual to comply with the group's viewpoint. This influence, which creates social conformity, is known as 'majority influence' and is the dominant process of social control. However, there also exists a 'minority influence', which emerges from a small subsection of the group and is a dynamic force for social change.

Minority Influence and Innovation seeks to identify the conditions under which minority influence can prevail, to change established norms, stimulate original thinking and help us to see the world in new ways.

With chapters written by a range of expert contributors, areas of discussion include:

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• processes and theoretical issues

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• the factors which affect majority and minority influence

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• interactions between majority and minority group members

This book offers a thorough evaluation of the most important current developments within this field and presents consideration of the issues that will be at the forefront of future research. As such it will be of interest to theorists and practitioners working in social psychology.

Part I
Introduction

1
Introduction: Theory and research on minority influence

Robin Martin
Aston University, UK

Miles Hewstone
University of Oxford, UK

Picture a time in history when books on etiquette were the best sellers of the day, when the subject of morality was not discussed in refined society, and when the family was sacrosanct. Picture a time when the preservation of the family in all its purity and sanctity was of supreme importance, when women were revered for their virginity and simplicity, when the marriage chamber was invested with a taboo of absolute secrecy, and when sexual instincts were not allowed expression except in marriage. This was the Victorian era. Picture then a lone scientist, in that day and age, proposing a theory of infantile sexuality, a man stating that children have both hostile and erotic relations with their parents, that a son desires his mother. This was Sigmund Freud. The outcry, the criticism that you are undoubtedly imagining, is in fact what happened.

(Moscovici & Nemeth, 1974, p. 217)

Freud was clearly a minority in the sense that his ideas were very different from the conventions of the time and what was accepted by the majority of people in society. Reaction to Freud was typical of that experienced by minorities. His work was initially not allowed to be printed, and, when it was, it was boycotted by the main scientific community, and both he and his supporters were labelled ‘perverts’. But as history tells us, despite the outrage and resistance that initially met Freud, his ideas became accepted and developed into the enduring, if still disputed, approach of psychoanalysis. This story is not a one-off. We could replace Freud with a range of historical figures including Copernicus, Galileo, and Jesus, or indeed their modern counterparts. The underlying theme is similar—a lone person who initially had very different opinions from those of society in general, who was chastised for holding those beliefs, but who subsequently had a profound and lasting impact upon the same people who had initially vilified them.

We can draw many insights from these case studies of people who have successfully influenced society; we will limit ourselves here to just two. First, societies have a tendency to resist change and will invest an enormous amount of effort to maintain the status quo. Society does not take kindly to those people who wish to oppose popular opinion or wish to go against the Zeitgeist. Second, whoever wants to change societal opinions is taking on a very big task—by advocating a new way of thinking or an original perspective they have to overcome resistance in the form of the status quo ante. As indicated above, such people often suffer for their beliefs through psychological, and even physical, abuse. The way in which people with minority opinions subsequently influence members of the majority to adopt their views is the subject matter of this book. We refer to this as ‘minority influence’ because it describes situations where a person or subgroup of people, who hold a position that is different from the majority of people in their society, attempt to change the majority towards their position. More specifically the book examines the factors that can increase minority influence (antecedents), the strategies and techniques employed by successful minorities (processes) and the effects of minority influence on people’s attitudes and opinions (consequences). This progression is reflected in the title of the volume, Minority influence and innovation: Antecedents, processes and consequences.

The remainder of this chapter is divided into three sections, which set the scene for the following 14 chapters. In the first section we define the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ more clearly. We then give a brief historical review of the development of research in this area, highlighting the main research questions and theoretical milestones. Finally, we describe the structure of the book and give a brief outline of each chapter.

Majority and minority influence

There are many attempts to influence our opinions every day. These attempts can come from a multitude of directions—reading a newspaper, watching the television, listening to the radio, or hearing a debate are all situations in which one person or group is trying to change the attitudes and opinions of another person or group. Often people try to support (or even denigrate) a particular position by claiming that many people, the majority, or relatively few people, the minority, support that position. A good example is provided by newspapers, where often the headline of the article suggests that either a majority (e.g., ‘Exclusive poll reveals 68% of English voters want own parliament’; Daily Telegraph, 26 November 2006) or a minority (e.g., ‘Only 34% back being in the EU’; Daily Mail, 12 December 2006) support a particular position (see Gardikiotis, Martin, & Hewstone, 2004). The proportion of people who support a position is known as the level of consensus and this can be represented in a number of ways (such as ‘80%’, ‘8 out of 10’, ‘the majority’, or ‘20%’, ‘2 out of 10’, ‘the minority’). It is this potential source of attitude change that is the subject of this book and, in particular, what the situations are in which people will pay attention to and be influenced by either a majority or a minority.

At the outset we need to give some working definitions for our key terms—‘majority’ and ‘minority’. One can identify at least three ways to define these terms. First, we might simply refer to consensus information concerning the number of people in the group, whether majority or minority. By definition the majority has to be numerically larger than the minority but it does not necessarily have to be above 50% of the population. In many political elections the winning party does not have the majority of the votes (the majority of votes being distributed over a number of parties). Representing majority and minority positions in terms of percentages is a common format, but not the only one. Saying that ‘9 out of 11’ or ‘2 out of 11’ hold different positions is similar to saying ‘82% (majority)’ or ‘18% (minority)’, respectively—what varies is the size of the underlying population upon which this is based (in the first case it is 11 people, in the second it is unknown).

Second, we can define these terms with reference to normative positions (that is, the opinions and beliefs that reflect ‘accepted’ standards in society). For example, most people in society believe that smoking is bad for your health and therefore people who are against smoking would be taking a pro-normative position while people who are in favour of smoking would be holding an anti-normative position. In this sense, the majority typically holds the normative position (against smoking) and the minority the anti-normative or deviant position (in favour of smoking). This distinction is fairly obvious with a topic such as smoking because it is now widely accepted, even among most smokers, that smoking is bad for your health. The situation becomes more complex with other attitudes. Consider, for example, abortion, where in some parts of the world a pro-abortion position would be a normative position held by the majority while in other countries it might be an anti-normative position held by the minority. What is important is that majority and minority positions are defined by the normative context that applies to the population with whom the potential recipient of influence identifies.

Finally, we can refer to the power relationship between the source and recipient of influence; that is, the ability of the source to exert influence over the recipient. In this sense, power refers to the ability to control important resources (such as praise, support, cooperation, etc.) with respect to another person. Majorities are numerically large and sometimes also have high status and therefore power over other people because they can control important resources. By contrast, minorities are neither numerically large nor typically high in status and are consequently low in power, and because of this they are often discriminated against and marginalized in society.

As we can see, there are many ways to define majority and minority status. Across these dimensions, one might define a ‘majority’ as the numerically larger group that holds the normative position and has power over others. In contrast, minorities tend to be numerically small, hold anti-normative positions, and lack power over others. We should stress that this is a generalized definition and there are exceptions; e.g., blacks in South Africa during the period of apartheid were the numerically larger group in the population but lacked power. In addition, it should be noted that in terms of the research described in this book, the general conception of majority and minority status has been based upon normative criteria—the majority and minority holding the pro- and anti-normative positions, respectively.

Brief overview of the development of research

Research in the area of majority and minority influence has gone through five distinct chronological phases and it is this historical development which forms the background of this brief review (see Martin & Hewstone, 2003; Martin, Hewstone, Martin, & Gardikiotis, 2008, for more detailed reviews).

The first phase of research, what we term early research on majority influence (pre-1970) examined how the majority was able to cause individuals to conform to or comply with its position (e.g., Asch, 1951; Crutchfield, 1955). These studies typically involved objective judgement tasks (such as judging the length of lines), and exposed participants to the erroneous responses of a numerical majority. The research question was, would naive participants agree with a majority of people who gave the obviously wrong judgement? Research has consistently shown that they do. Across a variety of different situations and topics, studies show that people will often agree with a majority of other people, even if they believe that the majority’s judgement is, in fact, incorrect (see meta-analysis of Asch studies by Bond & Smith, 1996).

The theoretical framework for explanations of conformity was based on the functionalist perspective of small-group behaviour derived from work by Festinger (1950). According to Festinger, there are pressures for uniformity within groups to reach consensus, particularly when there is an explicit group goal. These pressures create a psychological dependency of the individual on the group. Festinger argued that individuals are dependent on others for social approval and verification of opinions and beliefs. In this sense, the majority is able to satisfy both these needs: first, because people generally wish to belong to majority groups, and, second, because people accept as true, opinions that are widely shared (Jones & Gerard, 1967). Building on these ideas, Deutsch and Gerard (1955) drew an important distinction between two social influence processes underlying conformity: normative social influence (‘an influence to conform with the positive expectations of others’, p. 629) and informational social influence (‘an influence to accept information obtained from another as evidence about reality’, p. 629) (see assessment of this approach by Prislin & Wood, 2005; Turner, 1991).

The focus of this first phase of research was how the majority influenced the individual, and this neglected the possibility that the individual (or minority) could influence the majority. According to the dependency account of conformity, minorities lack the resources to make majority members dependent on them (such as, power, status, size) and therefore do not have the means to enforce normative or informational influence. Therefore, according to the conformity approach, social influence can only flow from those who have the power to create psychological dependency (such as a majority) to those who do not (such as a minority). Deviancy, within the functionalist approach, was seen as dysfunctional and a threat to group harmony; consequently, deviants either conform to the group or face rejection.

The second phase of research, which we term early research on minority influence (late 1960s–1980), reversed the research question from the first phase and focused on the conditions under which a minority can influence the attitudes of the majority. While nearly all the research in the first phase (until the late 1960s) had focused on how the majority can make individuals conform to their position, it is clear that there are many examples of individuals and minorities who have had a tremendous impact on the majority in society (from the ‘ancients’, such as Galileo, Freud, and Copernicus; to the ‘moderns’, Bob Geldof, Noam Chomsky, and Aung San Suu Kyi). It was this observation by the French social psychologist Serge Moscovici that led to a theoretical reshaping of the area and is considered the starting point for research into minority influence. Moscovici argued that if social influence only relied on conformity to the majority, then it would be difficult to see how groups changed, new ideas developed, and innovation might occur (Moscovici & Faucheux, 1972; Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969). In fact, we would not conceive of, let alone account for, social change. Moscovici challenged the unilateral or asymmetrical perspective on social influence that views influence as flowing only from the majority to the minority, which, he pointed out, ran counter to the numerous real-life examples of successful minorities.

Moscovici (1976) argued that all attempts at social influence create conflict between the source and the ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• PART II Processes and theoretical issues
• Part III Factors affecting majority and minority influence
• Part IV Dynamic interplay between majority and minority factions
• Part V Epilogue
• Author index
• Subject index