Compare and Contrast Minority and Majority Influence

As social beings, with each one of us connected to a whole network of other humans and their associated beliefs, opinions and traits practically every conscious second of the day, it is inevitable that we will be subject to external influences. These influences come in all shapes and forms from a whole multitude of sources, occurring both consciously and unconsciously, instantaneously or over a prolonged period of time, with the potential effect of these influences ranging from the immaterial to the life-changing. While our susceptibility to influence from the connected world around us can be hard to measure given our constant exposure to several different influences, social psychologists have been able to study the world of influence within a group context with some success, led by the likes of Asch and Moscovici. The principal questions which have provided direction to these studies include why people conform in groups and whether some people more likely to conform than others. One will address these two questions in the text below, while also looking to explain what “minority influence” is, and how it differs to what is considered majority influence.
To commence, one will look at the question of why people conform in groups. There appear to be two fundamental influences; informational influence, which involves people’s desire to be right (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004) and normative influence, which revolves around people’s desire to be liked, or at least not to appear foolish (B.Hodges & Geyer, 2006). Researchers demonstrated informational Influence by tweaking Asch’s famous experiment and making the three lines of different length a lot more similar to one another, making the correct identification of the matching line more difficult. With a more confusing situation, one would expect a participant to seek additional information about the lines, with increased social conformity the end result (Crutchfield, 1955). Testing the converse also provides