Propaganda for Change

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti

On August 28^th 1963, Martin Luther King took centre stage in Washington D.C and delivered one of the finest speeches in recorded history to 250,000 people- 250,000 people willing to listen to the voice of a minority, a voice that challenged the archaic racial view embedded in the masses. One year later President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. The opinion-deviant majority alter-cast or minority influence principle (Moscovici, Lage & Naffrechoux, 1969) accounts for some of history’s defining moments and proposes that if the minority is consistent, confident and committed in their judgement they become effective communicators (Moscovici, 1976). To give a more contemporary example, take Russell Brand- Dave Grohl and Jesus Christ’s cockney, comedian lovechild recently appeared on Newsnight and in the space of 10 minutes delivered one of the most well-articulated, slightly verbose accounts of bullshit ever presented on national television. However, the critical factors of consistency, confidence and commitment in his own argument managed to transform the generic largely politically unconcerned Facebook statuses of the British youth from the tedium of hangover updates and circling reviews to those of fierce aspiring revolutionaries. The point is whether you're a hippy, conservative, liberal, homosexual, terrorist, freedom fighter, average Joe, anarchist, Pope, white, black, clinically insane, partisan, Christian, Muslim, pagan, masochist, peasant, president, romantic, ladies, gentleman it does not matter, if you have enough belief in an idea you can change the world.

Moscovici (1976) demonstrated the effect of minority influence in one of the classic psychological studies. In the control condition a group of up to 6 naïve participants viewed a series of slides depicting various shades of blue. After being shown a slide participants were in turn required to say out loud the colour they had just seen before moving on to the next one. Under such conditions near much everyone identified the slides as being blue meaning the colour of the slide was deemed relatively unambiguous. In two experimental conditions a numerical minority (2/6) of the group were confederates of the experimenter and gave pre-agreed responses (Martin & Hewstone, 2012). Similarly to the control condition when presented with the series of blue slides participants were in turn asked to say aloud the colour they perceived. Confederates responded first and identified the depicted colour as ‘green’, an interpretation which clearly differed to that of the naïve participants. In the ‘consistent-minority condition’ confederates answered with the incorrect ‘green’ response on every trial and those in the ‘inconsistent-minority condition’ deliberately responded incorrectly on 2/3 of all trials.

Figure 1: a bar chart demonstrating the percentage of green responses by naïve participants in each condition.

Results reported that the presence of a minority that consistently provided unusual responses influenced the judgments made by naive participants in that 32% of the consistent-minority condition conformed to the confederate response at least once and as can be deduced from figure 1 18% of all responses in this condition were green . However, the inconsistent minority had virtually no influence over the majority whatsoever, which supports Moscovici et al.'s (1969) claim that consistency is one the keys to minority influence. In summary either we need to confiscate Russell Brand’s thesaurus or wait until he inevitably begins to make contradictory statements before we switch off when he says something he didn't intend to be a joke- power to the people. 

Rory MacLeod

References

Martin, R., & Hewstone, M. (2012). Minority influence: Revisiting Moscovici’s blue-green afterimage studies. In J. R. Smith, & S. Alexander-Haslam (Eds.), Social psychology: Revisiting the classic studies (pp. 91-106). London, England: Sage Publications.

Moscovici, S., Lage, E., & Naffrechoux, M. (1969). Influence of a consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a colour perception task. Sociometry, 32, 365–379.

Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London: Academic Press.

"Smell Like a Man, Man"

The more unique, bold and attention-grabbing an advertisement seems, the more standardized and clichéd it probably actually is. Or at least that that is what Goldenburg, Mazursky and Solomon (1999) believed. They identified 6 basic templates that 89% of 200 award-winning advertisements seemed to fall into. These templates included: Pictoral Analogy, Extreme Situation, Consequences, Competition, Interactive Experiment, Dimensionality Alteration. The above Old Spice ad created a lot of stir amongst viewers, and gained great popularity, reaching over 50 million views on YouTube. One explanation for its effectiveness may be due to its use of the consequences template, specifically the extreme consequences version. 

In the extreme consequences version, a set of situations is linked to a set of consequences via a linking operator. A consequence is a phenomenon, flow of events in the situation. "The situation in our example is a action, or behavior which results from the product attribute appearing in the message" (Goldenburg, Mazursky & Solomon, 1999, pp. 342). The consequences themselves need not be extreme, for example the advertisement repeatedly mentions that Old Spice will make "your man" smell more like a man (and less like a lady), an attainable consequence. In fact, this consequence needs to be both realistic and familiar to the audience. It is the linking operator which takes a select potential consequence and takes it to the extreme. This is demonstrated in Table 1 below.

In this situation, smelling more like a man is a feasible goal. The advertisement takes this a step further by implying that once this goal is attained anything is possible - "your man" may become attractive like the Old Spice man who has tickets "for that thing you like", diamonds and rides a horse. This linking operator is clearly quite extreme and absurd, and probably the very reason this ad has been so effective.

Reference:

Goldenberg, J., Mazursky, D., & Solomon, S. (1999). Creative sparks. Science, 285, 1495-1496.

Shareen Rikhraj