Jiin Jung, Ph.D. - Research

Minority Influence on Social Change

"Can a society achieve a sustainable and gradual change toward a pluralistic state while maintaining social cohesion?

What cognitive and social mechanisms underlie such a pattern of social change?"

A healthy society provides space for both change and cohesion. Diverse ideas should be able to move, mix, recombine, and connect; producing novel perspectives and solutions that enhance society's adaptability and resilience. However, shifts in majority-minority status during social change can trigger identity uncertainty and status threat, fueling intergroup conflicts and group schisms that result in societal division and polarization. This can challenge further change and strain our collective resilience. With a keen awareness of these two aspects of minority influence, one as a facilitator of collective adaptation and the other as an eroder of social cohesion, I seek to identify the social and cognitive mechanisms of group dynamics that promote social change and diversity while mitigating social division and polarization. With my research program, I aim to make significant academic contributions and offer actionable insights into fostering a more inclusive and resilient society.

Identity Uncertainty and Social Division

"Why does a society expose its fault lines and experience division in times of social change and uncertainty?

As society undergoes internal changes and external threats, these societal events can create uncertainty about one’s social identity (e.g., uncertainty about what it means to be American). However, It has remained unknown whether identity uncertainty would be a distinct psychological construct and how it would affect intergroup relations and social cohesion.

We developed a Social Identity Uncertainty Scale to measure this psychological experience (Jung, Hogg, & Choi, 2016) and extended the concept to capture both (a) identity uncertainty and (b) membership uncertainty (Wagoner, Belavadi, & Jung, 2017). We identified the antecedents of social identity uncertainty including rapid cultural change, disagreement within society about national agenda, the unknown future of society, and disagreement in historical narratives between neighboring countries (Jung, Hogg, Choi, & Lewis, 2019; Jung, Hogg, Livingstone, & Choi, 2019).

My research reveals that identity uncertainty as members of society not only separates the minority from the majority but also leads to further fragmentation within the minority group (Jung & Hogg, R&R; Jung, Hogg, & Choi, 2016; Jung, Hogg, & Lewis, 2018; Jung, Hogg, & Choi, 2019; Jung, Hogg, Choi, & Livingstone, 2019). This insight significantly advances our understanding of how a society becomes fragile and vulnerable during times of change, exposing the fault lines within our social structures. A minority's sense of voice and representation can mitigate the adverse effects of societal uncertainty on minority members’ psychology and societal division.

Indirect Minority Influence on Social Change and Diversity

"How do minority voices spread to society and change cultural norms and practices?

*The 2016 Best Paper Award

from the Computational Social Science of the Americas

*Published in American Psychologist

A Paper in the Psychological Perspectives on Culture Change Special Issue

& A Paper in the Topic in Focus: Tolerance

My research suggests that the majority’s open-minded and tolerant listening to minority dissenting voices can gradually spread minority voices to society (Jung, 2023). This manifests through the cumulative iterations of indirect minority influence (Moscovici et al., 1969, 1980), a type of minority influence via attitude change in a related issue first, then in a focal issue through an internal consistency between the related and focal issues (Crano, 2010; Wood et al., 1994).

Key findings include:

Gradual and coordinated change: Tolerance-induced indirect minority influence can gradually spread minority voices to society and bring them into equal standing with the status quo ideology (Jung & Bramson, 2014; 2016; Jung, Bramson, & Crano, 2018). The pattern of social change is characterized as a coordinated change where beliefs in multiple issues change together and emerge a new zeitgeist (Jung, Page, & Miller, 2017; 2021).
Tipping dynamics: Tolerance toward minority dissents must reach a certain threshold to tip the system toward social change (Jung et al., 2018).
Patterns of psychological and social change: The combination of tolerance and social network topology generates distinct patterns of belief dynamics. (a) When society is prejudiced and people are connected within parochial networks, societal belief distribution becomes homogenized and the cognitive belief system becomes disconnected and incoherent. (b) As society becomes more tolerant reaching a tipping point and people in different groups become more connected to display small-world characteristics, societal belief distribution becomes polarized and the cognitive belief system becomes coherent and rigid. (c) Then, as society becomes just slightly more tolerant or people in different groups get further connected, societal belief distribution becomes diversified and the cognitive belief system becomes coherent yet malleable (Jung et al., 2021).

My model is the first agent-based model that formalizes the dual process of minority-majority influence documented in social psychology literature. Although our society would reach a tipping point of tolerance, belief polarization would occur if social connections are inadequate. These findings imply that interventions should focus on tolerance and social connections to advance toward a pluralistic society.

Diverse Voices in Collective Decisions

"How are diverse voices brought into and potentially improve collective decisions?

*Published in American Psychologist

A Paper in the Multidisciplinary Research Teams: Psychologists Helping to Solve Real-World Problems Special Issue

The presence of diverse voices within groups does not necessarily guarantee their integration into collective decisions. I investigate how diverse voices are brought together and potentially improve collective decisions and what cognitive, social, and institutional mechanisms prevent groups from reflecting diverse voices in collective decisions. I have been collaborating with researchers from the fields of epistemology, political science, and complex systems scientists over the past decade. These collaborations were featured in American Psychologist Special Issue on Multidisciplinary Research Teams (Jung et al., 2019).

Key findings include:

Cognitive mechanisms: Memory limits and biased forgetting can prevent groups from reflecting diverse voices in collective decisions. Decision-makers tend to weigh more on recently expressed voices in my empirical jury deliberation experiment (Kerr & Jung, 2018). Agent-based simulation experiments revealed that recency bias persists even when agents are completely rational and open-minded; however, can be mitigated with unlimited memory (e.g., machine intelligence) (Singer et al., 2019; 2021).

Social mechanisms: A unique combination of social influence sources that produces consensus or polarization. Well moderated group deliberations (e.g., town hall meetings) can bring diverse voices into group consensus in a moderate stance. However, word-of-mouth and self-selected media influence polarize the public, preventing society from reaching a consensus (Pulick, Korth, Grim, & Jung, 2016).

Institutional mechanisms: Representative democracy doesn’t bring people’s voices into national decisions as accurately as direct democracy because representatives are few, and their stances do not cover the diverse stances represented in public; however, deliberation among representatives can mend the bias of representative democracy (Grim et al., 2020; Berger et al., 2022).

Minority Influence on Social Change

Identity Uncertainty and Social Division

Indirect Minority Influence on Social Change and Diversity

Diverse Voices in Collective Decisions

Press

BBC FUTURE | PSYCHOLOGY | by William Park, 11th August 2019

How the views of a few can determine a country’s fate