Minority and Majority Factions

Abstract

Few studies on social influence have had the enduring impact of Asch's (1951; 1952; 1956) experiments on the conformity responses of individuals to a fixed unanimous majority. Asch's seminal investigation stimulated numerous studies, including work on the reverse situation – responses of a majority to a fixed minority position on an issue. A common theme in social influence research has been the power of large versus small factions (though for counterexamples, see Moscovici, 1976; Nemeth, 1986). Many recent models of social influence, such as social impact theory (Latane, 1981; Latane and Wolfe, 1981), the other–total ratio (Mullen, 1983), and the social influence model (Tanford & Penrod, 1984) all use faction size as the central component. Research specifically focused on influence in small groups has demonstrated the power of larger versus smaller factions (e.g., Tindale, Davis, Vollrath, Nagao, & Hinsz, 1990), and majority/plurality and related faction-size models have often been found to provide excellent fits to empirical data (e.g., Davis, 1982; Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington, 1983; Tindale & Davis, 1983, 1985)….Thus, for many small decision-making groups, a majority or faction-size model of social influence in groups should provide a good baseline prediction (Tindale, et al. 1996: 81–2). It is now widely recognized that minority factions, including a minority of one confronting a unanimous faction of n − 1 others, may be influential. In particular, the work of Moscovici and his colleagues (Moscovici 1985; Moscovici and Mugny 1983; Mugny 1982; Nemeth 1986) on small factions, although controversial, has driven home the point that the influence of persons who are not members of the majority faction also must be considered in any broad theory of group processes.