1988 Volume 28 Issue 1 Pages 47-54
The present study examined how the consistent behavior of a minority affects both the behavior and the internalization of the behavior of a majority. The formation processes of the majority's attributions (judgements of confidence and competence) toward the minority were also investigated.
The subjects, 80 male undergraduate students, composed of five-member groups and were randomly assigned to either a 10-trial or a 20-trial condition. One of the group members was a confederate. For each trial subjects were required to construct a 70cm vertical line as accurate as possible on a screen at a distance of 3.3m. A confederate continued to present a deviant response (an 85cm long line). After the trials subjects were required to construct some vertical lines privately (posttest).
Results showed that (1) as trials progressed, the majority came to conform to the minority although the internalization of the behavior was not always found contrary to prediction, (2) the majority came to judge the consistent minority to be less competent but more confident than themselves, (3) in this attribution the majority was less sensitive to the judgement about confidence than to the one about competence, and (4) the majority judged the minority to be more confident than themselves when the majority's behavior was largely discrepant from that of the minority's.
It was concluded that both consistency of a minority's behavior and discrepancy between a minority's behavior and a majority's were important determinants in attributional process of confidence. However, several problems which must be dealt with in the future research were suggested.
