Better Be Convincing or Better Be Stylish? a Theory Based Multi-Agent Simulation to Explain Minority Influence in Groups Via Arguments or Via Peripheral Cues

Very often in the history of mankind, social changes took place because a minority was successful in persuading the dominant majority of a new idea. Social psychology provides empirically well-founded theories of social influence that can explain the power of minorities at individual level. In this contribution, we present an agent-based computer simulation of one such theory, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). After introducing the theoretical background and our agent model, we present three simulation experiments that confirm past laboratory research but also go beyond its findings by adopting the method of computer simulation. First, we found that even a minority with low argument quality can be successful as long as it has positive peripheral cues. Second, our results suggest that a higher personal relevance of a topic for the majority led it to be more receptive to minority influence only when the minority showed neutral peripheral cues and very good arguments. Third, we found evidence that a neutral or only slightly biased majority is influenced more easily than a strongly biased one. To sum up, we consider these results to illustrate the notion that a well-presented, comprehensible and valid computer simulation provides a useful tool for theory development and application in an exploratory manner as long as it is well founded in terms of the model and theory.