Compare and Contrast the Processes Involved in Majority and Minority Social Influence.

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Compare and Contrast the Processes Involved in Majority and Minority Social Influence.

An important type of social influence is conformity. Conformity occurs when someone voluntarily performs an act because others are doing it. That is, by conforming, someone is acting at odds with one's beliefs or perceptions because other people are acting in that way. From this stems two opposing views of influence, majority and minority influence.

The brilliant series of experiments carried out by Solomon Asch (1952) is a great example of majority influence. Asch was not the first investigator to study conformity, but his approach was the most direct and dramatic. He reasons that perhaps conformity occurred in only rather ambiguous situations, when people were quite uncertain about the correct standard of behaviour was. He thought that if the stimulus situation was clear, there would be little or no conformity as people would trust their own perceptions and remain independent.

Five students arrived to take part in a study of perception. They sat around a table and were told they would be judging the lengths of lines. They were shown a white card on which three black lines of varying lengths had been drawn and