ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with an extensive discussion of several distinctions in stimuli that are present in minority influence situations. These distinctions were often portrayed as dichotomies, such as the concept of 'normative' vs 'informational' influence, 'compliance' vs 'conversion', and 'extensive argument processing' vs 'superficial cue-processing'. The chapter presents an alternative that rests on considerations of when and how the individual reacts in response to minority influence 'mind', respectively. It proposes to reason in terms of how and under what conditions a given stimulus minority status of the influence agent in present context interacts with the state of perceiver's mind. The core concepts of conversion theory (CT) provide useful examples of the distinctions that we presently draw between 'mind' and 'matter'. Social influence by majorities, as conceived in CT, functions in a qualitatively different way. A conflict in attitudes between the majority and target of influence revolves around the question of why target sees things differently than most others would.
