Compare And Contrast Majority And Minority Influence

Contrast the psychological processes underlying majority and minority influence.

Change is inevitable. Whether that means change in appearance, opinions or circumstance. One way in which a person can change is through social influence. Social influence is when a person changes because of other people. In particular, groups of people sharing the same mindset or ideas, will social influence a person(s). There are multiple types of social influence. The first being, majority influence. Majority influence occurs when a smaller group of people, or even a single person, are influenced by a larger group of people (Cook, 2018). A minority influence, is therefore the other way around (2018). When the larger group is influenced by the smaller group.
It needs to meet in the middle, in which there is flexibility within the ideals, as well as rigidity, too much of either is seen as dogmatic as well as out-of-date. This stance will not win over the majority of people. So, minority groups attempt to be more open-minded as well as assertive, in order to be taken seriously by the majority. With regards to majority influence, it was discovered that majority groups are quite the opposite in terms of flexibility. They tend to be less creative, as well as having a more narrow minded approach, in comparison to minorities (Nemeth, 1986). In contrast to this, Nemeth also found that minorities has more of a consideration towards opposing viewpoints, which is called the divergent approach. For majority groups, it is called the convergent approach (1986). However, this experiment also displayed that consistency wasn’t always the singcnaint factor within minority groups. The results showed that a minority group was formed as a result of change in opinion, which means that they were inconsistent with their ideas as opposed to consistent. So, this challenges the viewpoint held by Moscovic in which, consistency is the key factor in influencing people to follow minority