Focus Versus Flexibility Majority and Minority Influence Can Both Improve Performance

Abstract

Charlan Nemeth argued in 1986 that exposing people to a majority point of view causes them to focus exclusively on that view (convergent thought). Exposure to a minority viewpoint stimulates people to consider an issue from multiple perspectives (divergent thought) -to go beyond what is given by either the majority or the minority. This study supports and extends that cognitive processing hypothesis by demonstrating that (a) minority influence encourages understanding an issue from multiple perspectives and encourages flexible, or integrative, thinking among those perspectives, (b) majority influence can aid performance tasks requiring convergence on one dimension of a two-dimensional task (i.e., the Stroop task), and (c) majority influence can teach multiple perspectives on a problem one at a time but does not encourage flexible thinking among those perspectives. The convergent nature of majority-influenced thought interferes with the ability to use both of the dimensions simultaneously.

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