ABSTRACT
This chapter begins how majority/minority source status can affect attitude change through different psychological processes that emphasize primary cognition. It focuses on this secondary form of cognition, describing recent work on majority/minority source status that reveals that source status can influence attitudes by affecting confidence in thoughts. The chapter highlights a number of current and future issues relevant to the majority/minority source status research in persuasion. It described how earlier research on minority versus majority influence showed that the numerical status of the source can influence attitudes by serving as a simple cue, by affecting either the amount or direction of thinking, and hypothetically by serving as an argument. The chapter reviews the different ways in which the majority/minority status of the source can affect persuasion through a variety of mechanisms relevant to primary and secondary cognition. It describes the processes operating when the majority/minority source information was included after message-processing.
