Critically Evaluate the Modern View of How Attitude Change Occurs with Reference to One Dual-Process

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Critically Evaluate the Modern View of How Attitude Change Occurs with Reference to One Dual-Process

Baron & Byrne (1972) state that "...social influence occurs whenever our behaviour, our feelings or our attitudes are altered by what people say or do". There are types of influence that can apparently change our attitudes and these are majority and minority influence. For majority influence that change is public and hence is more likely to be relatively transitory. For minority influence, more pervasive attitude change is likely to occur, and on a more private/latent level.

Attitude change as the result of group pressure is likely to be the function of two distinct types of influence: normative and informational. Normative influence refers to a desire to be liked and an aversion to being disliked. People are influenced by information when they trust the judgement of others above their own. Ways of explaining attitude change fall into the categories of single process models (e.g. Latane & Wolf, 1981; Tanford & Pemrod, 1984) and dual process models (e.g. Moscovici, 1980; Nemeth, 1986). Single process theories argue for one process underlying both majority and minority influence. According to dual process theories, majority influence occurs through compliance while majority influence occurs through conversion, with the latter assumed to have a greater impact conversion.

Moscovici (1980 argued that majorities instigate a comparison process by which group members attention focuses on "what the others say, so as to fit in with their opinions or judgements". In contrast minorities, if consistent, induce a validation process by which a group member's attention focuses on trying to "see what the minority saw, to understand what it understood." Comparison therefore presumes fairly superficial information processing focusing on the position that is advocated, and validation presumes more active, information processing focusing on the more complex matter of how this position was derived from an external reality. Moscovici's proposal thus resembles to some extent the heuristic systematic and peripheral-central distinctions of which the latter will be focused on later. Minority influence, as Moscovici argued was deeper and more enduring than majority influence. Thus, differences in informational processing are presumed to cause majorities to produce change at a surface level of public compliance and to cause minorities to produce longer-term change at the deeper level of private acceptance. Along with these processing differences, motivational forces, based on group member's desire to gain the majority's approval, conspire to encourage public agreement with the majority. Desires to avoid appearing deviant and viewing oneself as an outgroup member might also discourage public agreement with the minority.

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Another dual process theory was one which was devised by Nemeth (1986), Whereas Moscovici elaborated little on this comparison process, Nemeth argued that the stressfulness of such situations by the majority lead to a relatively superficial processing by which group member's attention and thought converge on the majority's stated position but do not extend to a full consideration of the issue. Minority sources are postulated to stimulate a greater amount of thinking, and this thinking tends to be more divergent, where the term divergent refers to thinking that branches out from the information that is given and focuses on new ...

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