What is minority influence

A final observation regarding minority influence is that, after being successfully persuaded by a minority, people tend to forget the origins of their new views. This phenomenon, known as social cryptomnesia , often occurs when a person held negative views of the minority whose views they adopted. Instead of identifying with the minority group, individuals will dissociate the minority views from the people who promoted them.

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Is there a purpose behind our dreams and nightmares? How can the colors around us affect our mood? To induce conversion, minority members must engage the attention of majority members. Next, minority members should coherently express their alternative view and provide a strong rationale for it. After the initial presentation of their position, members of the minority must be consistent in their support for their position over time.

In this way, the minority demonstrates that the alternative position is credible and that the minority is committed to the view. Finally, minority members should emphasize that the only way to restore stability and agreement in the group is by majority members changing their views. Although these general strategies increase the chances that the minority will successfully influence the majority to adopt its position, they might not be effective in all situations.

For instance, a particularly powerful majority group might be extremely resistant to the minority view no matter how strong the minority case might be. However, the minority may still influence the majority through indirect routes.

Another important factor in minority social influence is the relationship between the minority and majority in the group at the time that a disagreement occurs. If the members of the minority have established relationships or shared experiences with members of the majority, then attempts at minority influence may be more successful.

For example, the minority members might have agreed with majority members in previous tasks or decisions. As a matter of fact, the recognition approach allows to regard social change and innovation, i. Hence, negative group experiences lead to struggles for recognition that can be framed as collective actions of denied minorities. Acknowledging outgroup minority influence represents a key idea for a model of social influence as an interdependent process between majorities and minorities.

Influence, thus, has to be seen as reciprocal action instead of group pressure on an individual. The sphere of love and friendship mainly relates to interpersonal relationships, whereas the two other spheres — the legal sphere and the sphere of social esteem — are relevant for understanding the dynamics of intergroup relations and are of particular interest for addressing relationships between majorities and denied or fighting members of minority groups.

Within these two spheres, individuals are recognized — or not — respectively as entitled to rights and as endowed with specific qualities and cultural identities. The idea of interdependence between majority and minority, marking out a space for shared communication, may be placed alongside the dialectical conception of social change developed by Honneth It makes it possible to study innovation within the normative and socio-political framework where it evolves by unpicking and differentiating the various modes of recognition peculiar to modern society.

The distinction Honneth proposes between the spheres of recognition allows a better understanding of the dynamics of social change as a product of outgroup minority influence. One development from the philosophical theory of recognition applied to the very notion of outgroup minority influence was the formulation I proposed of an interactionist approach to the study of racism and xenophobia Sanchez-Mazas, In my application of the notion of spheres of recognition to different historical periods of intergroup relations in modern democracies, I retained the legal sphere and the sphere of social esteem because they are of particular interest for addressing intergroup relationships between minority groups i.

It is likely to throw light on the adoption by denied minorities — that is, categorized as outgoups by the majority — of alternative responses, whether proactive, reactive, or passive, to denials of recognition that go along historical or contemporary societal divisions.

It should also help to explain the very conditions of possibility for outgoup minority influence and for the societal transformations it has been able — or is still likely — to bring about. In the legal sphere, struggles for recognition are often undertaken in the name of principles of justice acknowledged by the majority i.

These principles, peculiar to the legal sphere, have guided the aspirations, the actions and the ideals of individuals and groups since the beginning of the modern era. A typical example is the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, which was born out of a potential conflict of values within white society. In this way, outgroup minority influence works through the induction of a conflict that is likely to attack the ambivalence running through democratic societies and to close the gaps between discriminatory norms and the value of equality Tajfel, In the legal sphere of recognition, outgroups are thus capable of inducing solidarity with their plight among members of the majority and of including new categories into the circle of the beneficiaries of rights that have been promoted according to an egalitarian credo.

The legal sphere, as it is defined by Honneth, is characterized by considerable potential for extension, since legal struggles are concerned with principles of justice and equality validated by the majority.

However, aspirations that grow up in the sphere of social esteem appear far more problematical. Unlike legal recognition, where people are granted rights regardless of their personal qualities, recognition in the sphere of social esteem depends on informal social judgments.

This last sphere refers to the mutual appreciation of subjects. Individuals and group members judge each other as a function of the values, practices, and cultural identities represented in the surrounding society. People are evaluated positively to the extent that they are perceived as possessing the qualities and abilities that are required to contribute positively to the common practices valued in the majority group. The application of the recognition approach to racism and xenophobia suggests that a shift in the denial of recognition may take place through the transition from the legal barrier separating former outgroup minorities i.

Moreover, the denial of social esteem in the form of racist prejudice did not fade out as a result of the removal of segregationist barriers after the Civil Rights Act of Such a shift suggests that majorities strive to maintain a social or symbolic distance from minorities — hence they still see them as outgroups — even after the formal barriers have been removed. The denial of social esteem through racial prejudice, xenophobia, or discrimination is particularly salient when the targets of stigmatization benefit from formal equal rights i.

Contrary to the exclusion from the sphere of universal rights, the exclusion from the community of values destroys the interdependence between majority and minority. Despite the possession of formal rights that includes the former outgoup in the world of equals, the minority is again, yet through renewed forms of misrecongition through contempt or denial of esteem and consideration Honneth, , positioned by majority members outside the shared world.

Through relegation to otherness, judgments of merit and esteem peculiar to the sphere of values are radicalized. With visionary anticipation, the French thinker Tocqueville [], , p. I see that in a certain portion of the territory of the United States at the present day the legal barrier which separated the two races is falling away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country, slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable.

Whoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived that in those parts of the Union in which the Negroes are no longer slaves they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.

In response to this type of denial — despite the access to formal rights — through prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices, one can expect a radicalization of conflicts of interests between majorities and minorities or even a competition among minority groups.

This will promote the transformation of outgroups from active minorities yielding conflicts of viewpoints, values, or beliefs, to minority groups inducing such conflicts of interests by putting forward particularistic — and often ethnocentric — claims as victims.

Adopting persuasive strategies in the sphere of social esteem turns out to be particularly difficult. This difficulty partly derives from the rise of the cultural paradigm, as opposed to the political paradigm that prevailed during the Cold War years. Indeed, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the division separating the world into contrasting blocs along political and ideological lines i.

Through relegation to otherness, judgments of merit and esteem peculiar to the sphere of values and esteem are enhanced. Exacerbation of differences in the area of social esteem is accompanied by a cutting-off of normal communication, by a negation of the speech conducive to revolt, or even by forms of systemic violence Moghaddam, These denials may trigger responses that are no longer framed in terms of universalist interests, but rather that promote particularistic group interests instead of struggles in the name of equal rights, in an attempt to recover or gain dignity following past or present disciminations and contempt.

In turn, this particularistic way of struggling for recognition encourages rejection by the wider community, thus contributing to legitimate minority violence even more. An outcome of these struggles for recognition is competition among the victims Chaumont, and animosity from groups that perceive themselves as insufficiently recognized. Moreover, the processes of recognition are no longer concerned with the aspiration to extend the application of general principles, but rather to obtain compensation for past offenses.

Hence, this approach renders all members of the victimized group equivalent through a process of self-stereotyping that naturalizes the victims and limits their agency. Indeed, once the compensation or the recognition has been obtained, the guilty majority has settled the case through a resolution of the manifest conflict and does not enter into the process of latent influence. In this commentary, I have argued that social influence phenomena cannot be reduced to ingroup allegiances.

In line with Mugny and his colleagues, I defend the idea that social innovation is rooted in the conflict that minorities are capable of intoducing into the majority system of values Sanchez-Mazas, As a complement to the notion that innovations are preceded by rejection, discrimination, and denial of active minorities, I suggest that the innovation they introduce may be followed by renewed forms of prejudice and discrimination — as in the case of hidden and subtle forms of racism — as a result of majority resistance to change Kinder, This is all the most likely to occur that the new norms cannot be incorporated into the majority normative framework through a process of validation that characterizes latent forms of influence.

Thus, relegation to otherness trough new and indirect expressions of prejudice maintains forms of exclusion and contempt that deny the possibility of a common world. Moreover, through struggles for recognition taking the form of violence or victimization, actors can no longer experience the diversity of their positioning and deal democratically with the divisions that run through them.

However, just as Tajfel , following Hirschman, could distinguish between different types of voice according to the subjective perceptions of intergroup relations opening the way to collective action or social creativity, social psychologists could devote attention to further distinctions of the voice according to historical and societal factors that may orient toward particularistic or broader goals the actions of minority groups.

In order to reach a better understanding of contemporary forms of responses to denials of recongition, it is essential to define the broader societal context in which they are embedded. Edward Sampson is particularly critical of laboratory research on minority influence. He makes the following points.

The participants in laboratory experiments are rarely 'real groups'. More often than not they are a collection of students who do not know each other and will probably never meet again. They are also involved in an artificial task. As such they are very different from minority groups in the wider society who seek to change majority opinion.

For example, members of women's rights, gay rights and animal rights organizations, members of pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are very different from participants in laboratory experiments. They operate in different settings with different constraints. They often face much more determined opposition. They are committed to a cause; they often know each other, provide each other with considerable social support and sometimes devote their lives to changing the views of the majority.

Power and status laboratory experiments are largely unable to represent and simulate the wide differences in power and status that often separate minorities and majorities. Also, females are said to be more conformist than males, therefore there might be a gender difference in the way that males and females respond to minority influence. Another critic could be that four people are not enough for a group and could not be considered as the majority. Asch, S. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment.

Guetzkow ed. Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. Moscovici, S. The group as a polarizer of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 12, Toward a theory of conversion behavior. Berkowitz Ed. New York: Academic Press. Mugny, G. When rigidity does not fail: Individualization and psychologization as resistances to the diffusion of minority innovations.

European Journal of Social Psychology , 10 1 , Nemeth, C. The differential contributions of majority and minority influence. Psychological Review , 93,