From the Rennsselaer Polytechnic Institute
Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.”
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks. One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders. Each of these individuals held a view, but were also, importantly, open minded to other views.
Once the networks were built, the scientists then “sprinkled” in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.
“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.
“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan said. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”
The research has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads. “There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion,” said Associate Professor of Physics and co-author of the paper Gyorgy Korniss. “Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village.”
The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.
The research was funded by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) through SCNARC, part of the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
The research is part of a much larger body of work taking place under SCNARC at Rensselaer. The center joins researchers from a broad spectrum of fields – including sociology, physics, computer science, and engineering – in exploring social cognitive networks. The center studies the fundamentals of network structures and how those structures are altered by technology. The goal of the center is to develop a deeper understanding of networks and a firm scientific basis for the newly arising field of network science. More information on the launch of SCNARC can be found at http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2721&setappvar=page(1)
Szymanski, Sreenivasan, and Korniss were joined in the research by Professor of Mathematics Chjan Lim, and graduate students Jierui Xie (first author) and Weituo Zhang.
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This is obviously a very simplistic model, which does reveal the existence of tipping points in opinion spread. That the speed of spread is not proportional to the size of the proselytizing group because of the non-linearity of networks..
Other similar work has been done with the agents having a varied degree of persuadability and the influence of media input also included with two opposing opinions in play –
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/9/1/11.html
Pretty graphs of how a population might polarize, split, or even vary around a consensus.
No free will in that equation?
I don’t believe it. Offhand I can think of at least a half dozen 10% minority beliefs that have remained minority beliefs for years to centuries. Some of these minority beliefs:
JFK shot by CIA and Oswald framed for it.
911 an inside job by the U.S. gov’t.
Obama born in Kenya.
Apollo moon landings faked.
UFOs with beings from other planets in them fly around in the sky and the U.S. gov’t knows about them and has made contact with them.
Crop circles made by aliens from another world.
AIDS not caused by HIV.
Atheists comprise 10% of general population 200 years ago and same today.
10% of senior scientists (national academy members today) believe in God, 20% are agnostic, and 70% are positive athiests. The ratio has remained steady since at least 1930 among senior scientists. Among all scientists about 40% believe in God which also hasn’t changed in at least a couple of centuries.
The list goes on and on. I hope no taxpayer funding was involved in this bit of junk science.
I don’t see any real world applicability. If you’ve ten percent committed believers you presumably at least 10 percent of committed non-believers. Makes no sense to me.
I’d say there are a couple of missing factors here. In order to get the 10% to tip and become the accepted norm there has to be another mechanism at work, or another agency. As the report says –
“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.”
Therein lies a part of the key. If the group attempting to change the public perception presents its arguments as “popular” and has control of the mass media or education, you are able to shape the thinking by a process of ‘drip feed.’ Think Hollywood. Sometime in the 1970s Hollywood began creating ‘Doomsday’ movies, all of them with a similar theme and message – “Capitalist Megalomaniacs/Mad Scientists/rogue military/human activity has triggered/will trigger/does trigger, catastrophe.” Suddenly the 1% group thought that sees us heading that way has reached an international audience and – bingo – you have a majority opinion based on clever graphics, slick and very careful presentation of very selective information.
Extend that to the teacher in a classroom full of 5 – 7 year olds, telling them their parents lifestyle is “destroying the planet” and you have laid the foundations for at least 10% of these kids to grow up as Green Activists. Dr Goebels laid down the maxim, which the left wing of the political spectrum has put to excellent use in undermining our present society, that “tell a lie big enough and no one will question it. Tell it often enough and it becomes the new truth.”
I suggest that what this study has not taken into account is the influence of the educators and the media – those are what determines which 10% opinion becomes the “majority” view.
What happens after the 10% tipping point and the minority opinion becomes the majority opinion, which is then subsequently proved to be wrong?
Why, that sounds just like a bubble, doesn’t it?
I’d say the reason for uncritical acceptance of environmentalism and multi-culturalism is because schools have been indoctrinating students for 40 years.
These models, like much economics, are junk if they don’t model basic psychology.
The entire study sounds as though it is the research arm of the Al Gore propaganda dept.
Was there no one in the development process or review of this study that either had the logic of a three year old or didn’t have a PHD?
This study is so inbred it boggles the mind. What about money? Add that in. How about sex?
Holy excrement Batman, the inmates are running the asylum.
izen says:
July 27, 2011 at 4:18 am
These results emerge from a population who are capable of changing their viewpoint being influenced by 10% who are incapable of responding to any outside influence.
In the field of climate science there are over 90% of scientists who are extremely unlikely to change their viewpoint without direct physical evidence that the AGW effect is being negated by something else.
Nice try. You’ve jumped from the population, meaning all people, to a specific category, “climate scientists”, many of whose views on CAGW are influenced by concerns about funding, about career, an I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine policy, as well as the herd instinct and not wanting to rock the boat. See the difference?
It is simply not in their best interests to threaten the CAGW mindset in any way.
obviously it worked………
First they convinced everyone that the “normal/average/zero” line is right at the top of every temperature reconstruction……….
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/IceCores1.gif
Interesting concept but needs more reality. Too many real world examples contradict the models conclusions.
Models all the way down.
conclusions based on models without empirical data…hahaha.
Dave Springer highlights some minority beliefs that remained minority beliefs. But, why stop there? There are lots of much more obvious examples. Take as an example any religious order (judaism, catholicism, eastern orthodox, islam, protestant… the list goes on). even within religions there are flavors and sects. None of these sects should ever spring up (from <10% of the population) to begin with. how about politics? under the authors model, we should all believe the same thing. sure, one could postulate random generation of new ideas, but what is the probability that 10% of the population comes up with the same new idea at the same time?
maybe 10% is the cutoff for the widespread *awareness*, diffusion, and consideration, of a particular idea, sure i'll buy that. but translating consideration into adoption and committment well, no way.
Lets hope this gets through
http://theenergycollective.com/jakeschmidt/61939/house-committee-seeks-gut-funding-support-international-action-global-warming-bad-
This works for bad ideas and lies as well.
The case for multiple 10% groups would be an obvious followup study, because multiple groups firmly set in conflicting opinions is the hallmark of almost every society.
Making everyone work together for their own good (er, I mean, “for the common good”) has always been the goal of dictators and kings, who determine what “good” is.
A free society pulls in all kinds of directions.
Dave Springer says:
July 27, 2011 at 6:49 am
I don’t believe it. Offhand I can think of at least a half dozen 10% minority beliefs that have remained minority beliefs for years to centuries. …
Add committed advocates. Liberal athiests are active now. Your comment about athiests implies that scientists make up a large %age of the sample. They are sparse. Their footprint is usually limited to other scientists and to university settings. They have saturated their footprint.
Apologies for leaving the /sarc tag off my previous post.
I am not a scientist by trade, but a very interested observer. I would argue that we as human beings have to be “scientists” to a certain extent in order to live properly. Every day we make decisions based on our perceptions and what we know. When we don’t know, we ask questions and look for answers. Some people accept the authority of others unquestioningly as the source of their answers (I am not one of those people). It seems, and I say seems, to me that this model assumes that most people will follow an opinion if it is simply repeated more than once. There doesn’t seem to be any thought process or free will taken into consideration. Those things perhaps cannot be modeled? If they can then they should.
I do not mean to completely berate the folks doing this study, but I get so tired of seeing these proclamations and announcements of “discoveries” and find out these “facts” are simply more computer model fodder. “Discovery” automatically implies a fact of reality that is discovered. Computer models are not facts of reality.
“used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. ”
And there was me, just taken receipt of my bulk order of Airfix modelling glue! Oh well… back to online searches for a cheaper supplier!
P.S. I am sorry guys! All I seem to post these days are sarcastic comments but blame the warmists, not me, for their poor efforts. Is this really all they can offer up, another computer based H.S. graph? Social Cognitive fer heck sake!
I remember once, a long time ago, my brother in law telling his 3 year old child “You had to learn to have a social conscience”. I must admit to smiling the next morning when the father found his golf clubs buried at the bottom of the garden!
Who makes this “Social Cognitive” crap up? Oh! I remember! It was back in my younger days during Thatchers years? All the toss pots that could not get a real job went back to be social lecturers at college! Heck, after a hard morning of electrical engineering at least we had one lesson that was not marked up for the diploma so we could get a short nap!
By the way, in the quote at the beginning of my post, where I posted the quote, it was written, “analytical methods”. Should that have “sic” after it? I was always more mathematically driven than English Lit! Oh well, back to the model of the Lancaster bomber!
Where is the Mule when we need him?
More than 10% of the worlds population is communist. So when will the change take place.
By the way it only takes one person to be correct and all will change eventually.
Some people might object to this article being posted here, but it really is perfectly suited to a ‘global warming’ website.
We have a sensational headline and a strong claim in the opening paragraph:
“Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.”
And it isnt until you wade to the bottom of the article that you learn that this claim is completely false. These ‘scientists’ have not found out anything about the population, as the headline claims. Instead, these ‘scientists’ have supposed something about the population, and they have built a computer model that embodies their supppositions. And the results of that model are now beiong presented as objective, ‘scientific’ fact about the real world.
This is a perfect analog to ‘climate science’, which is a computer model driven exercise, the results of which are taken as fact about the real world, observations be damned.
This report states:
“The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. ”
This is the sort of thing that must be done before making model based claims about the real world.
In the history of selling an idea, probably the dumbest mistake (thanks, AlGore!) was to proclaim “the debate is over”. Until then, whatever debate there was had simply flown under the radar of a great many folks, most especially those of the Liberal or Democratic persuasion. That was my “tipping point” towards skepticism.
This study is basically worthless in my opinion. It could only be of importance if the 10% true believers were trying to convert a poplulation of people with no opinion of one way or the other. Let’s apply this to the AGW scam…. fully more than 10% truely believed man is primarily responsible for global warming but yet the numbers who now truly believe that is steadily dropping. I guess the authors would like to suggest that having 10% true believers is more important than having 40+% true believers so the 10%ers win out everytime?
Was there any room in this study to decide whether or not a belief or idea had anything at all to do with truth? I personally believe, that what ever the belief or idea may be, truth in the end will win out.
If a belief or idea is false it really does not matter if 100% of the population believes it. It is still false.
Let’s consider a practical application.
I’ll invite 8 of my friends to join my new political party. Since I have an unshakeable belief that I am the most qualified person in the group, that opinion will quickly become the majority belief and I will become the leader. Then I’ll invite enough additional people to double the size of the group and wait for our joint belief to, inevitably, become the majority opinion again. Once I repeat that process about 30 times, I’ll be elected ruler of the world. QED.
Don’t yell at me, it’s their model. I just did the math.