social influence research

‘How has social influence research helped us understand social change?’
Social influence can be defined as change in an individual’s attitudes, feelings, behaviours or thoughts that results from interaction with another individual or group. The majority can also influence individuals; this is when a large portion of an individual’s referent social group holds a particular attitude, it is usually then that the individual will adopt it as well. Social change refers to a major change in the social structure of a society, or a widespread change in the behaviour of the people in that society. It occurs when a whole society adopts a new belief or way of behaving which then becomes accepted as the ‘norm.’ Research into social influence helps us understand how whole societies can be influence to change, not just individuals who change their personal beliefs.

One movement that causes social change is Greenpeace. Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning organisation that acts to change attitudes and behaviour to protect and conserve the environment. They state its goal is to ‘ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity,’ Greenpeace defines its mission is as following:
Catalysing an energy revolution- this is to address climate change which is the number one threat facing the world
Defending the oceans- to be achieved by creating a global network of marine reserves and challenging wasteful and destructive fishing
Protecting the world’s ancient forests- also the plants, people and animals which depend on them
Campaigning for sustainable agriculture- by protecting biodiversity and encouraging socially responsible farming and rejecting genetically engineered organisms,
Creating a toxic free future- including having safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals in today’s manufacturing and products,
Working for disarmament and peace- by tackling the causes of conflict and calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
The main way in which Greenpeace differs from other organisations is because they are independent; they do not accept donations from governments or corporations, instead they rely on contributions from more than 2.8 million individual supporters and foundation grants. Greenpeace evolved from a group of Canadian peace and anti-nuclear protestors ‘The Don’t Make a Wave committee’ into a less conservative group of environmentalists whom reflected hippie movements of the 1960s and 1970s; by 1977 there were 15-20 Greenpeace groups globally. Throughout the decades Greenpeace has not changed their ethos they are still an: independent, non-violent, creative confrontational group. Just like then, now their activists are their largest strength and support they have always remained peaceful within any protests and campaigns.

Another movement that social influence was used as a force for positive social change is Fairtrade. Fairtrade is an organised social movement and has a market-based approach that aims to help producers in developing countries to make better trading condition and promote sustainability. Even though the concept of ‘fair trade’ has been around for decades, the Fairtrade Foundation was established in the early 1990’s by other charities such as Christian Aid, Oxfam and Tradecraft. The foundations mission is to work with businesses, community groups and individuals to improve their trading positions in the South and to deliver sustainable livelihoods for farmers, workers and their communities by:
Being an ambitious development organisation committed to tackle poverty and injustice through trade
Using certification and product labelling through the Fairtrade Mark as a tool for their development goals
Bringing together consumers as well as producers in a citizens’ movement for change
Being recognised as the UK’s leading authority on Fairtrade

The main focus of Fairtrade is exporting goods from developing countries and deliving them to developed countries including: sugar, tea, cocoa, fruit, cotton, flowers and chocolate. Despite the fact that the number of ethical labels is growing, Fairtrade remains unique since they focus on helping farmers and workers improve the quality of their lives and enable them to take more control of their future. Fairtrade is the only certification scheme whose purpose is to tackle poverty and empower producers in developing countries.

Both Greenpeace and Fairtrade have changed society in different ways. A few decades ago environmental campaigners would have been seen as a group of hippies who would have never affected the world on a large scale however now they have increased their influence and have a majority support they are seen to be a group of people who care about how humans are affecting the world and want to change this; many individuals now are also agreeing with their statements and changing their beliefs similar to Greenpeace.

Within social influence is conformity; this involves a change in belief or behaviour in order to fit in with a certain group, it is also known as majority influence. It is can be used to indicate an agreement to the majority position brought about either by a desire to fit it, gain approval or simply to conform to a social role.

One significant study into conformity is that of Solomon Asch (1951). Asch designed an experiment to test conformity in a situation where the correct answer was obvious, an earlier study into conformity includes Sherfit’s auto kinetic effect experiment however this it can be argued that participants conformed because they were unsure as to the correct answer therefore they went along with information provided by other participants within the group.
Asch’s experiment included a simple judgement of which three comparison lines match the standard line, he asked students to participate in a ‘vision test’ however in reality all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter. The participants divided into groups of 5-7 people once the group was shown the three different lines group members had the task of simply stating which line was the same length as the reference line, there were two lines that were obviously different however group members gave their answer one after the other, and the real participant gave his answer in next to last place. Each group performed the task 18 times and on the first 2 trails the confederates answered correctly however for the next 12 of the remaining16 trails they answered incorrectly. Asch’s findings were that there was mean conformity rate of 32% (estimated to be around 1/3) of the critical trails and about 74% (around 3/4) off participants conformed at least once and only 25% of participants did not conform at all.
The conclusion from this, given that the task was simple and easily completed was that it clearly demonstrated an extremely high level of conformity; participants could be persuaded by group pressure to go against the evidence of their own eyes. Asch investigated the precise factors that influence conformity by varying factors in his experiment: the first one being size of the majority- the group size changed to just two with one obviously being a confederate this resulted with almost zero conformity. A majority of two confederates showed a small degree of conformity and groups with three or more confederates produced the highest rates of conformity; showing that there was a majority of three or more people in a group to cause conformity even when there is an obvious answer. Another factor, which affected conformity within Asch’s experiment, was the nature of the task; making all three lines more similar to the reference line then the conformity rate increased. The conclusion made from this being that when a task is more difficult individuals are more likely to refer to the majority opinion and so conformity is more likely when the task was more difficult. Overall the Asch experiment shows the effect of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgements.

Both Greenpeace and Fairtrade started off as minority groups meaning that they had a minority influence, this term refers to people who reject the established norm of the majority and move to the position of the minority whereas majority influence results from exposure to the majority position, having the tendency for people to adopt the behaviour, attitudes and values of other members of a reference group. A psychologist who carried out an experiment into minority and majority influences was Moscovici (1969); he investigated whether or not a consistent minority could influence a majority to give an incorrect answer in a visual perception task. The experiment involved groups of 6 where there were 2 confederates, and within these groups they were shown 36 varying shades of blue slides to which they had to estimate the colour of. The two conditions within the experiment were: in the consistent condition that the 2 confederates stated that the slides were green and not blue and the other being in the inconsistent condition they stated the slides were green on 23 of the 36 trials and blue on the other 12 trails. Overall the participants agreed with the minority on 8.4% of the trailers and 32% of participants gave the same answer as the minority at least once; showing that a consistent minority can influence members of a majority to make an incorrect judgement. In 1985 Moscovici announced an influential minority must posses several behavioural characteristics if it is to succeed in creating social change, this including: consistency, commitment and persuasiveness.

However Moscovici clamed that Asch and others had to too much emphasis on the idea that the majority in a group has a large influence on the minority. He believed that it was also possible for a minority to influence the majority, even Asch agreed with him. Within Moscovici’s experiment he made a distinction between compliance and conversion, where compliance is common in conformity studies (used in Asch). Therefore Moscovici carried out a re-run of Asch’s experiment but in reverse. Instead of one subject amongst a majority of confederates he placed two confederates together with 3 participants.

Greenpeace can be related to both Asch’s and Moscovici’s experiments. At the beginning of their campaigning many saw them as ‘an unlikely group of loosely organised protestors’ who were just causing unnecessary conflicts however now they have increased their influence and have the majority of support worldwide. By using commitment throughout the late 1960s/ early 70s with reference to the nuclear weapon test issue they managed to gain global support on their belief about The Don’t Make a Wave Committee. They sailed to Amchitka which created a lot of public interest and alerted the world to what the U.S government were doing, even though the nuclear tests still went ahead later on in the same year the U.S agree to stop testing an Amchitka proving that Moscovici’s characteristics worked. After this Greenpeace has used consistency and persuasions to increase their support. Since they are a non-government organisation they need money, this comes from donations and fundraisers meaning they’d have to use persuasive arguments and techniques against trying to protect the world in which we live in.
The snowball effect (Van Avermaet 1996) describes a way in which minorities’ covert into majorities. When members of the majority slowly move towards the minority, it increases the size of the minority group until it coverts to a majority opinion, it can be said that this happened with the Greenpeace campaign again Kit Kat palm oil lobbying. This took place when UK Greenpeace posted a gory parody video of the standard Kit Kat; the aim was to get Nestle to stop buying unsustainable palm oil from SinarMas- a global supplier that was destroying the South East Asian rainforests where orangutans’ were being threatened. The campaign took a global turn and many people boycotted Kit Kat, then only 10 weeks after the campaign went viral Nestle announced it would stop sourcing the unsustainable palm oil, it was said to be one of Greenpeace biggest victories. This just shows that with the influence of social media and with the use of consistency from individuals persistently boycotting Nestles social media sites can change a whole companies attitude, however it can be argued that Nestle didn’t have any other option since this would just keep happening due to the mass amount of protestors Greenpeace had gained. Also with this particular campaign it can show that Asch’s experiment, which proved that the effect of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments could also be applied since the it was the pressure of protestors social media sites which proved Nestles lack of social crisis management and it can be said that this contributed significantly in Greenpeace success.

Similar things can be said about Fairtrade to Greenpeace. Over the years Fairtrade have shown Moscovici’s message of using consistency, commitment and persuasiveness with succeeding in creating a social change. Commitment is one of the main aspects Fairtrade seems to have within their organisation; they are committed to working with group communities and individuals to improve their livelihoods. In addition to this consistency have be also applied to Fairtrade because they need to keep regulating yearly and since they are creating livelihoods for other farmers, stopping can decrease their standard of living making people reliant on Fairtrade. Following this comes consistency, Fairtrade need to have a consistent source coming from the farmers to keep the organisation going in the northern hemisphere where the products from the farmers are mostly supplied to. Finally persuasiveness is needed for Fairtrade to get their largest incomes, if the company can persuade the large companies (for example Starbucks) then the Fairtrade products will become more available and the public will have more access to them also making them more aware of what Fairtrade is and can then encourage them to buy it regularly.

To conclude, social influence has helped us understand social change because from carrying out research, I have learnt that Moscovici promotes a message that for the minority to cause change within society they need to be: consistent, committed and persuasive; and since consistency is one of the most important behavioural styles a minority group if they are being consistent will finally gain the majority that is committed within a certain social position. Then if the minority is committed, it can be harder to ignore sending beliefs to the majority that there is another viewpoint. This can be related to how Greenpeace and Fairtrade have managed to now gain a majority viewpoint on their beliefs. In addition from researching into Asch’s experiment it can also be applied to Greenpeace and Fairtrade, they have influenced a change in society because from Asch’s experiments they show the effect of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgements meaning that if enough people are put under pressure from a certain movement then they are going to change their minority view point and be influenced by the majority. Overall it can be argued that this is how Greenpeace and Fairtrade now have the majority influence.