Majority or Minority Influence :: Politics, Compliance, Conversion

This essay concerns brotherly deviate in general. Aspects of social influence as such as majority influence and minority influence willing be discussed in terms of their underlying psychological processes and how they differ. Majority influence or conformity refers to the desire to belong or to fit in within a particular classify which involves adopting certain attributes, behaviour and attitudes of a particular base. As a result individuals consequently experience group pressure (in Baron, Branscombe & Byrne 2008). Minority influence on the other hand, refers to the influence that the minority exert over the majority in that the majority come to support the beliefs and behaviours of a minority (in Baron et al. 2008).A considerable body of seek has been injected into the nature and impact of both majority and minority influences. Moscovici (1980 in pig and Vaughan 2007) claimed that both majorities and minorities exert influence in different ways. One psychological process underlying majority influence is through direct everyday compliance. The dual-process dependency model which was postulated by Deutsch and Gerard, (1955 in Hogg and Vaughan 2007) proposes two Copernican motives for conformity normative social influence and informational social influence. Normative social influence refers to the need to be accepted and approved by society. This involves individuals to deepen their behaviours and to adopt new/current ones that are associated with the particular social group so that they are not rejected (in Hogg & Vaughan 2007). An example of this smear can be reflected in Aschs (1956 in Baron et al. 2008) orbit of conformity in which participants conformed to the majority group but at the alike time maintained their own private opinions and disagreed. This process is known as compliance (in Bailey, J.et al. 2008).The second motive that explains why people conform consort to Deutsch and Gerard, (1955) is based on informational social influence. According to Festinger, (1950, 1954 in Hogg & Vaughan 2007) this eccentric person of influence is associated with uncertainty. Here individuals are uncertain and lack knowledge as to how to behave in certain situations. Festinger referred to this as social comparison in which individuals are not fully confident about their beliefs, attitudes and opinions and therefore dedicate to majority in order to be correct. This occurs particularly under uncertain conditions and is clearly demonstrated in Aschs (1956 in Hogg and Vaughan 2007) and Sherifs (1936 in Hogg and Vaughan 2007) studies in which participants converged on similar answers particularly when the tasks became passing difficult for them to be able to rely on their own judgments (in Bailey et al.