Minority Influence

Background

For many years in psychology, social influence research was much like a broad one-way street. Researchers focused on the impact of the powerful on the powerless, the strong on the weak, the expert on the uninformed, the majority on the minority. It was obvious that the powerful majority could exert tremendous pressure on the minority to do its bidding. This orientation assumed that most people wanted to belong to the majority group, an assumption borne out in considerable research. Threats of ostracism or expulsion from one's social group are taken very seriously. They are a major source of the majority's persuasive strength.

The stress on majority influence in social psychology was longstanding. It was encouraged by Solomon Asch's famous line of judgment studies and carried forward by Carl Hovland's persuasion experiments of the 1950s. Most influence studies focused on factors that affected the success (or failure) of the majority to induce the minority to do its biddingor at least to agree publicly with the majority's position.

Definition of Minority Group

Minorities have been defined in a number of ways, along a number of dimensions, the most important of which are number, power, and normativeness. The simplest and most widely used dimension in research on minorities is number. The group with the most members is the majority, and those with fewer members constitute minority groups.

Power matters as well. The majority typically has considerably more clout than the minority. It has the muscle to reward or punish, to include or ostracize, and it uses this power to get its way and to maintain its superior position. Sometimes power and number are not synonymous. Before the end of White rule in South Africa, for example, the Black population was considered to be the minority, even though Blacks vastly outnumbered the White ruling class. The White power structure, however, wielded sufficient control to maintain its superior position. In this case, number did not define the minority, whereas a lack of power certainly did.

Finally, there is the normative dimension. Typically, the majority defines what is right or wrong, proper or improper. It is unusual for leaders of a victorious army to prosecute their soldiers for war crimes. Usually, it is the soldiers of the losing side who are defined as criminalsas those who violated the norms of good conduct, as defined by the winners (the majority). As such, the majority often views the minority as holding improper or illegitimate positions relative to the majority's definition of what is good and proper.

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