THE MEDIATIONAL EFFECTS OF ATTRIBUTIONS AND INFORMATION-PROCESSING INMINORITY SOCIAL-INFLUENCE

Minority influence research has focused on behavioural factors that le ad to successful social influence, such as acting in a consistent mann er, but has tended to ignore the psychological processes that may medi ate successful influence. Moscovici (1976) posited that such psycholog ical mediators include attributions concerning the causes for the mino rity's behaviour and a validation process in which subjects carefully consider the issues raised by the minority position. The current artic le examines the links between social cognition theories of stereotypin g and attitude/impression formation and minority influence by delineat ing the role of both attributions and systematic message appraisal in minority influence. Successful minority influence was predicted to be dependent on the types of attributions formed towards the minority bec ause such attributions influence the manner in which we attend to and think about a minority position. The data reveal that subjects with po sitive attributions were more influenced by the minority message than subjects with negative attributions. More importantly, this difference in persuasiveness was shown to be mediated by different cognitive pro cessing strategies-subjects with positive attributions were more likel y to systematically process the minority message. In addition to explo ring the cognitive underpinnings of successful minority influence, the impact of social pressure and power struggles between social groups i s considered in evaluating the applied value of such process-oriented research. Finally, it is suggested that while consistent behaviour is one way in which the minority can draw attention to its position and i ncrease the likelihood of influence, recent models and stereotyping an d impression formation suggest another approach. Instead of the minori ty accepting the burden for instigating a validation process in member s of the majority, such attention and validation can be instilled in t hose perceiving the minority through adopting goals that promote indiv iduated and systematic information processing; through rejecting stere otypic and schematic processing strategies that promote biased impress ions.