The taboo against group contact: Hypothesis of Gypsy ontologization

The concept of this article is that the symbolic relationships between human beings and animals serve as a model for the relationships between the majority and the ethnic minority. We postulate that there are two representations that serve to organize these relationships between human beings and animals: a domestic and a wild one. If the domestic animal is an index of human culture, the wild animal is an index of nature which man considers himself to share with the animal. With the wild representation, contact with the animal will be taboo, as it constitutes a threat to the anthropological difference. We offer the hypothesis that ontologization of the minority, that is, the substitution of …

Internalization of conflict and attitude change

In a 2 × 2 × 2 design, eighty smokers were exposed to an anti-smoking appeal attributed either to an expert source (superior status) or a minority source (inferior status). Subjects were either allowed or not to smoke during the experiment. In addition subjects had to memorize part of the appeal and a recall task either followed after reading the appeal (completed task) or not (uncompleted task). The results show that the expert source produces more attitude change than the minority when the tension induced by the source is weakened (either by the opportunity to smoke or task completion). In contrast the minority has more impact when subjects are not able to smoke or when the task is not co…

Nota epistemológica para un análisis psicosocial del racismo

Indirect majority and minority influence: An exploratory study

In a 2 × 2 design, 85 subjects were asked to estimate the size of angles (direct influence) that were either 90 or 85°, after being confronted with incorrect judgements of a majority (88 per cent) or a minority (12 per cent) of people estimating the angles at 50°. Additionally, pre- and post-test measures were used to establish indirect influence on subjects' judgements pertaining to acute angles (i.e. on the estimation of the length of lines constituting the angles, and on the imaginary weight of figures represented by these angles). Overall, little direct influence is observed. This may partly be due to the introduction of a denial of the credibility of the source in all conditions. In fa…

Procesos sociocognitivos de la influencia minoritaria

ResumenSe presenta un experimento (plan 2x2x2; N = 180) en el que se estudia la influencia directa e indirecta de una minoria en funcion: a) del grado de conflicto inducido por la retorica minoritaria; b) de si los jucicios mayoritarios son independientes o interdependientes; c) de las implicaciones altas o bajas del cambio de actitudes. Los resultados muestran que, como previsto por el modelo de la disociacion de la comparacion y de la validacion, cuando los juicios son efectuados de modo independiente, la influencia aumenta en funcion directa del conflicto inducido por la retorica minoritaria.Esta influencia se inhibe a nivel directo y se desplaza hacia un nivel indirecto en la condicione…

A New Multicast Technique for Video Transmission over ABR Services in ATM Networks

Multicast techniques are the only way to simultaneously provide flows of information from one source to several destinations. The intention of this paper is to study and to evaluate different multicast techniques using a video coder based on an adaptive video compression algorithm with subband coding and a best effort network service like ATM with the Available Bit Rate (ABR) service. This video transmission can adapt faster and easily to changing network conditions. In this way, we present an evaluation process for a determined network configuration. Thereafter we discuss the results obtained by simulation and propose for this video transmission a trade-off between these multicast techniqu…

Identified Risk Factors Among Truck Drivers Circulating in France

The growth of the European market for road-freight transport has recently led to important changes. Moreover, due to the geographical context of France, truck drivers from different countries circulate on French roads to deliver their goods. Having road safety concerns in mind and based on a literature review, as well as interviews, a French questionnaire has been developed. Aiming at collecting data among truck drivers from different European countries, the questionnaire has been translated into seven languages and has been administered at four highway rest areas in France. The collected data were analyzed by means of multiple correspondence analysis, which pointed out new links between wo…

Avoiding minorities: Social invisibility

Three experiments examined how self-consciousness has an impact on the visual exploration of a social field. The main hypothesis was that merely a photograph of people can trigger a dynamic process of social visual interaction such that minority images are avoided when people are in a state of self-reflective consciousness. In all three experiments, pairs of pictures—one with characters of social minorities and one with characters of social majorities—were shown to the participants. By means of eye-tracking technology, the results of Experiment 1 (n=20) confirmed the hypothesis that in the reflective consciousness condition, people look more at the majority than minority characters. The res…

Gypsies: What Threat? Threat and Purity in Majority and Minority Relationships

Paraphrasing the book Purity and Danger by Douglas (1966), this chapter analyses the relationships between the majority and the minority in terms of threat and purity. The majority will do everything possible to remain pure; in other words, not to mix with the minority ontologised as wild (i.e. closer to nature than to the majority culture). The taboo of contact underlies a whole series of daily practices and discourses. Through such means, the majority socialises its members so that they do not mix with stigmatised minorities. The second part of the chapter focuses on the social construction of the Gypsy minority as a threat to Gadje society. Prejudice, discrimination, and persecution, whi…

Majority and minority influence, task representation and inductive reasoning

One hundred and fifty-five participants had to solve a set of 2–4–6 like reasoning problems (Wason, 1960), in which they were told which hypothesis a majority (or a minority) proposed, as well as which example was used for the test. In a 2 × 2 design, participants were also told that the problems allowed either one single correct answer or several possible answers. Results show that, when the source is a majority and the problem allows one single answer, most participants adopt the source's hypothesis and use confirmatory testing. On the contrary, it is when the source is a minority and the problem allows several answers that most participants give alternative hypotheses and use disconfirma…

Natura y cultura como principio de clasificación social. Anclaje de representaciones sociales sobre minorías étnicas

ResumenLos estudios sobre el racismo indican que en la actualidad en el contexto occidental predomina la discriminacion latente sobre la manifiesta. Aun replicandose este patron, tambien se observa que unas minorias son mas discriminadas que otras. Se plantea que el enfoque de las representaciones sociales puede resultar mas adecuado que los enfoques actitudinales para comprender esa fisonomia del racismo. Tras diferenciar discriminacion y ontologizacion, la principal hipotesis es que la dimension natura-cultura sirve de base para una clasificacion social, dentro de la cual determinadas minorias son representadas fuera del mapa social (ontologizacion). Se presenta un estudio que ilustra, po…

Mixing against culture vs mixing against nature: ontologization of prohibited interethnic relationships.

In this paper, we develop the theory of ontologization: Social representations that prevent members of minority and majority groups who are living in contact with each other to mingle. The process of ontologization consists of separating some humans from their own species, and anchoring them in another environment, that of an animal, for example. We propose that underlying the famous slogan "equal but separate" is the social representation of interracial mixing as a "counter-nature" phenomenon. It is predicted that a sexual relationship between people of different "races" leads to a greater degree of ontologization, and, as such, this miscegenation will be explained in terms of biologistic …

The taboo against contact with minorities: A folk‐anthropology approach to prejudices

‘Zeitgeist’and minority influence—where is the causality: A comment on Clark (1990)

Does the mood of the time (Zeitgeist) facilitate the influence minorities are able to exercise, or is it itself a direct product of minority influence ? It is argued, from a social psychological definition of the minority-majority relation, that the former interpretation fails to explain many of the observed effects and in particular the conversion effect. A model is offered that is consistent with the second interpretation.

Majority and minority influence in inductive reasoning: A preliminary study

Ninety-three students were exposed to majority and minority influence in an inductive reasoning task. The former induced convergent thinking processes, though its effects were not reducible to mere compliance. The latter activated more divergent constructive processes, supporting the predictions of Conversion Theory.

When a compliance without pressure strategy fails due to a minority dissenter: A case of “behavioral conversion”

While a strategy of compliance without pressure (Joule, 1987) had the effect of inducing almost all of a group of smoking subjects to stop smoking first for 18 hours then for 3 days, simply observing someone (an accomplice) break his or her own initial agreement to abstain from smoking for 18 hours was enough to bring about a substantial reduction in the willingness of other subjects to later abstain for 3 days. However, subjects did not follow the lead of the accomplice immediately, and persisted in their agreement to abstain for 18 hours. This pattern of indirect, but not direct influence, suggests that there may be a type of minority influence at work here that represents a sort of behav…

Social representations of COVID-19 (Representaciones sociales del COVID-19)

This is a reflection on the communication modalities of dissemination, propagation and propaganda as they have manifested in the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes the anchoring of the representations...

The New Moral Power of Minorities

The model of three interrelated social entities proposed by Gabriel Mugny to account for the role of active minorities in social innovation and change retains all its relevance and heuristic value (cf. Mugny, 1982). However, the fight of the civil rights movements of the ’60s transformed the moral perspective from which the majority regards their own behaviors towards social minorities. This resulted in an immorality judgment of discriminatory attitudes and behaviors that had long been regarded as natural. Thus a change has been effected on the relationships between majority and minority groups, providing minorities with a new moral power. As a result of such a new moral representation of p…

A study of minorities as victims

This article presents the idea that during the 1990s an important change took place in relation between minorities and majorities: the emergence of minorities as victims alongside the formerly predominant active, militant minorities. A hypothesis is raised that these two types of minorities differ in their agenda as well as in the nature of the influence they exert. Active minorities trigger an external conflict with majority and induce conversion (latent rather than overt influence); minorities as victims create an internal conflict, a sense of guilt, within the majority, while they exert an exclusively overt influence. We report two experiments confirming our hypothesis. We discuss the no…

Independence and interdependence of group judgments: Xenophobia and minority influence

A first experiment examined the effects of two methods of dividing resources between Swiss nationals and foreign residents in a study involving 118 subjects. Subjects gave judgments involving either interdependent allocation (resources allocated to the outgroup cannot be allocated to the ingroup) or independent allocation. The results indicated that the socio-cognitive functioning preferred by subjects varies as a function of their view of outsiders. Interdependence of judgments was more characteristic of the most xenophobic subjects, whereas the least xenophobic were more likely to reason in terms of independence. On the other hand, intermediate subjects (those who were clearly neither for…

El uso de SIG de software libre en una práctica de Biología y Geología de 4º de ESO: los ecosistemas.

Para consolidar el conocimiento del bloque del currículo de Biología y Geología de 4º de la E.S.O. (Educación Secundaria Obligatoria) relacionado con los ecosistemas, hemos desarrollado una metodología docente basada en los Sistemas de Información Geográfica (SIG), en la que el objetivo de los estudiantes es crear un shapefile con atributos espaciales e información ecológica sobre los distintos Parques Nacionales de España mediante su digitalización. Se ejemplifica con el procedimiento concreto del Parque Nacional de Doñana. A través del SIG, con un software gratuito para el centro, se aumenta la interactividad del estudiante con la asignatura, se desarrolla la creatividad y se mejora la ca…