Minority Influence Essay

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In this project, we aimed to learn more about minority influence, including its theory, real life example and implications in our society. Minority influence is defined as a form of social influence, which takes place when a minority, like an individual, influences a majority to accept the minority's beliefs or behavior. In order to illustrate the process and strength of minority influence, we showed parts of a popular movie - ‘12 Angry Men’. It is a movie narrating the discussion between 12 juries in a jury room, in which one of the juries was casting a “not-guilty vote” and eventually managed to convince the rest to change their votes in the end. Minority Influence is not a common social influence; a more common form of social influence is actually conformity, which is also termed as Majority Influence. In order to illustrate the theories and differences between these two forms of social influence, we studied two experiments done by Solomon Asch and Serge Moscovici, who were the pioneers in the researches of Majority Influence and Minority Influence respectively. Asch’s experiment showed that due to Majority Influence, the subjects would deny the evidence of his own eyes and yield to the group influence. Yet, on the other hand, Moscovici’s experiment showed that sometimes the minorities can exert an effect over the opinion of a majority. Moscovici presented the participants with various shades of blue and asked them to shout the color out loud. One of the participants was an actor and often named a blue tone as green to the surprise of the other participants. Over 8% of the participants adapted the minorities view and started to shout out ‘green’ instead of ‘blue’. During the whole process over 32% changed their option to the minority’s one at least once. There are several factors that influence this experiment: consistency, the size of the minority, the behavioral
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