Social Influence, Conformity Bias, and the Study of Active Minorities

The chapter aims to criticize the postulates underlying the current studies on social influence and discard the one-sided association of social influence with questions and facts related to conformity and deviance. It shows several new directions, both conceptual and experimental, which could lead to an understanding of innovation; and demonstrates the importance of behavior style as a general source of social influence. Power effects and influence effects have been differentiated and have shown that the latter play a specific role in assigning attributes. Intraindividual consistency and interindividual consistency have a vital function in these inferential phenomena. They also have a vital function in processes related to influence. The chapter provides the different ways in which a consensus is arrived at: when the majority partner has a norm and the minority partner is deprived of any norm; when partners are equals and each is in possession of his or her own norm; and when the minority partner has a norm, which he or she opposes to the norm of the majority partner. Because a consensus is a result and a form of treating social conflict, by reducing the variation of inter and intraindividual responses, the chapter also dealt with the modalities of social influence—the dynamics of social conflict. The chapter develops a set of hypotheses and an experimental paradigm that allows beginning a study of innovation and of the influence of minorities on majorities. This is possible regardless of the nature of the norm (implicit or explicit), and that it can occur at the response level as well as the coding level. Special attention has been given to the direction of this influence, distinguishing between approach, avoidance, and polarization in relation to the minority.