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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The New Moral Power of Minorities

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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 persecuted minorities, a new category of minorities – victimized minorities – has appeared. In this paper two studies are reviewed comparing the influence of victimized minorities and ‘classical’ active minorities. Those studies show that victimized minorities attain more manifest influence than active minorities, while active minorities effect greater latent change on the representation of the minority group.