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Not everyone conforms or obeys — and social influence does not only flow from the many to the few. This lesson covers the two ideas that complete the Edexcel Social Psychology topic. First, resistance to social influence: why some people withstand the pressure to conform or obey, explained through a situational factor, social support, and a dispositional factor, locus of control (Rotter). Second, minority influence: how a numerically small group can change the attitudes of a majority through consistency, commitment and flexibility, producing genuine conversion that can escalate — via the snowball effect — into society-wide social change. The two ideas belong together: resistance is the precondition for minority influence, because a minority can only begin to change a majority when some individuals are willing to break ranks.
Key Definitions: Resistance to social influence is the ability to withstand social pressure to conform or obey. Minority influence is a form of social influence in which a minority persuades others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours, typically producing internalisation — a genuine, lasting change of private opinion.
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
Edexcel 9PS0 — Paper 1, Topic 1: Social Psychology. This lesson maps to the specification's treatment of factors affecting resistance to social influence (social support and locus of control) and of minority influence and its role in social change, including the factors that make a minority effective (consistency, commitment, flexibility) and the processes by which influence spreads.
Assessment Objectives exercised:
Connects to…
Social support is the presence of one or more other people who resist the pressure to conform or obey, making it easier for an individual to do the same. It is a situational explanation — a feature of the environment, not the personality of the resister — and it works through two mechanisms: breaking the unanimity of a conforming majority, and providing a model for disobedience to an authority.
Social support and conformity. In Asch's original study, conformity was 37% on critical trials against a unanimous majority. Introducing a single dissenting confederate who gave the correct answer cut conformity dramatically to 5.5%. Crucially, the dissenter did not need to be correct: a confederate giving a different wrong answer still reduced conformity to about 9%. This shows the active mechanism is breaking the unanimity of the majority, not the correctness of the ally — once the majority is no longer unanimous, the social cost of being the lone deviant collapses. When the dissenter left part-way through, conformity climbed back toward its original level, showing social support must be maintained to remain effective.
Social support and obedience. In Milgram's variation with two disobedient confederates (fellow "teachers" who refused at 150V and 210V), obedience to 450V fell from 65% to just 10%. The confederates provided a model for defiance: they demonstrated that resisting was possible and carried no catastrophic consequence, giving the genuine participant the confidence to follow suit.
Exam Tip: Always explain the mechanism of social support — it is not simply that "another person present helps". Social support breaks unanimity (conformity) or models disobedience (obedience). Naming the mechanism earns the AO1 depth.
Julian Rotter (1966) proposed locus of control (LoC): the extent to which individuals believe they have personal control over events in their lives. Unlike social support, this is dispositional — it locates resistance inside the person's stable personality.
Key Definition: Locus of control is a personality dimension describing the degree to which people believe they, rather than external forces, control the outcomes in their lives. It runs along a continuum from high internal to high external.
graph LR
A["High Internal LoC<br/>(I control my outcomes)"] --- B["Most people<br/>(near the middle)"] --- C["High External LoC<br/>(luck/fate/others control outcomes)"]
| Internal LoC | External LoC |
|---|---|
| Believe they are responsible for what happens to them | Believe things happen because of luck, fate or powerful others |
| Seek out information and make independent decisions | More passive; accept the influence of others |
| Higher self-efficacy and self-confidence | Lower sense of personal control; less self-confident |
| Lower need for social approval → better able to resist | Higher reliance on approval → more likely to conform and obey |
People with a high internal LoC resist more because they take personal responsibility for their actions, base decisions on their own beliefs, and have higher self-confidence and a lower need for social approval — all of which work against the very levers (responsibility-displacement, uncertainty, fear of rejection) that social influence relies on. A person who feels responsible for their actions is, for instance, less able to comfortably enter Milgram's agentic state.
Research evidence. Holland (1967) repeated Milgram's procedure and measured LoC: he found that 37% of internals did not continue to the highest shock level, compared with only 23% of externals — internals were significantly more able to resist. Oliner and Oliner (1988) interviewed people who had sheltered Jews from the Nazis ("rescuers") and found they scored significantly higher on internal LoC and social responsibility than non-rescuers. Avtgis (1998) conducted a meta-analysis and found people with a more external LoC were more easily influenced and more likely to conform, confirming the relationship is consistent rather than a one-off.
Rotter measured LoC with a 29-item forced-choice questionnaire, in which respondents pick, from each pair, the statement they agree with more. It is essential to remember LoC is a continuum, not a dichotomy — most people sit in the middle, and only those toward the extremes show markedly different behaviour.
While conformity involves the influence of a majority on an individual, minority influence involves a small group (or individual) changing the attitudes and behaviours of a larger group. It is central to understanding social change — from the suffragettes to civil rights and environmental activism.
Serge Moscovici et al. (1969) provided the landmark evidence that a consistent minority can influence a majority.
| Condition | Trials the majority agreed with the minority ("green") |
|---|---|
| Consistent minority | 8.42% of trials |
| Inconsistent minority | 1.25% of trials |
| Control group | 0.25% (rare genuine errors) |
The consistent minority was almost seven times more influential than the inconsistent one. In a second part, participants privately sorted ambiguous blue–green slides; those exposed to the minority shifted their private threshold toward "green" — including some who had publicly resisted — evidence of a deeper, internalised change (conversion), not mere surface compliance.
1. Consistency. The single most important factor, demonstrated by Moscovici. A minority should be consistent both over time (diachronic — the same message repeated) and between members (synchronic — all members agreeing). Consistency draws attention and signals conviction, prompting the majority to ask why the view is held so firmly.
2. Commitment. When a minority demonstrates commitment — by enduring hardship, risk or personal cost — its message is taken more seriously, because observers reason no one would suffer for a cause they did not genuinely believe. This is the augmentation principle: perceived sacrifice augments influence. The suffragettes' hunger strikes and imprisonment are the classic example.
Key Definition: The augmentation principle states that if a minority is seen to make sacrifices or take personal risks for its position, its influence is increased, because the majority attributes the behaviour to genuine, deeply held belief rather than self-interest.
3. Flexibility. Nemeth (1986) argued that rigid consistency can backfire: a minority seen as dogmatic is dismissed. Effective minorities balance consistency with flexibility — a willingness to engage in dialogue and adapt the presentation of their position without abandoning its substance. Nemeth found a flexible minority (prepared to compromise on a related point) exerted more influence than a rigid one in a mock-jury negotiation.
Moscovici (1980) argued minority influence works through a different process from majority influence. A consistent minority creates cognitive conflict in the majority: people cannot easily dismiss a view held so firmly, so they think more deeply about it (systematic processing). This deeper processing can produce conversion — genuine private change — even where the person continues, for a time, to comply publicly with the majority. Because conversion is private and effortful, it often emerges as a delayed or indirect influence.
| Majority influence (conformity) | Minority influence |
|---|---|
| Tends to produce compliance (public agreement only) | Tends to produce conversion (genuine private change) |
| Focus on fitting in | Focus on understanding why the view is held |
| Superficial processing | Deep, systematic processing |
| Immediate but shallow | Slower but more enduring |
Once a minority converts a few majority members, those converts enlarge the minority, which influences more people, until a tipping point is reached and the minority position becomes the new majority view — the snowball effect. When a society then adopts the change but forgets its origins, social cryptoamnesia has occurred (most people support women's suffrage but may not connect it to the specific suffragette campaigns).
graph LR
A["Consistent, committed minority"] --> B["Cognitive conflict;<br/>deeper processing"]
B --> C["Some of the majority<br/>convert"]
C --> D["Minority grows;<br/>snowball gathers"]
D --> E["Tipping point"]
E --> F["New majority norm;<br/>social cryptoamnesia"]
The stages of social change are: (1) drawing attention; (2) cognitive conflict; (3) consistency; (4) the augmentation principle; (5) the snowball effect; (6) social cryptoamnesia. Conformity processes then complete the change: as the snowball grows, NSI pulls in people who want to fit the emerging norm, while ISI persuades others the new position is correct. Minority and majority influence are thus successive phases of one process, not rivals — as the suffragette, US civil-rights and environmental movements all illustrate.
Applying the model to documented movements is exactly the kind of AO2 work Edexcel rewards, and it also strengthens evaluation by showing where the model fits and where it strains.
| Movement | Consistency | Commitment (augmentation) | Flexibility | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women's suffrage | Decades of sustained campaigning by a persistent minority | Hunger strikes, imprisonment and force-feeding dramatised the depth of conviction | Some strategic shifts between constitutional and militant tactics | Legislative change extending the vote to women in stages |
| US Civil Rights Movement | Sustained marches, boycotts and legal challenges over years | Arrests, personal risk and violence endured by activists | Non-violent negotiation and coalition-building | Landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s |
| Environmental / climate activism | Consistent, repeated campaigning over decades | Activists accept arrest and disruption to their own lives | Ranges from institutional lobbying to direct action | Shift of climate change from a fringe concern into mainstream policy debate |
Reading across the table, the common thread is unmistakable: each movement combined consistency (a message maintained over time and between members), commitment that operated through the augmentation principle (visible sacrifice signalling authentic belief), and — where successful — enough flexibility to avoid being dismissed as fanatical. Each also displays the snowball effect, as early converts enlarged the movement until the once-minority position became the majority norm, and elements of social cryptoamnesia, since the resulting attitudes are now so mainstream that many people do not consciously connect them to the specific campaigns that won them.
But the same examples also expose the model's limits, which is why they are useful for evaluation as well as application. In every case, change depended on far more than the minority's conduct — sympathetic media coverage, shifts in economic and political conditions, and the receptiveness of key gatekeepers all mattered, exactly as Nemeth (2010) argued. And for every movement that succeeded, many equally consistent and committed minorities failed to change anything, which shows that consistency, commitment and flexibility are necessary but not sufficient. Using real examples in this two-edged way — to illustrate the mechanism and to bound it — is the mark of an answer that assesses rather than merely describes.
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