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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Dedicated followers of fashion? I am wholly amused by the uptake of certain electronic products which seem to me to be no better in quality or function than others yet they rapidly become core to the market place and sell millions at high prices. It seems there are a lot of folks who want to be told what to buy (do?/think?) without spending any time at all investigating the consequences – or reading a little history to understand what has gone before.
This is why I like WUWT so much – there seems to be a majority of commenters who are willing to at least stop and consider the alternatives and let us all know what they are thinking in clear mostly polite conversations. Thanks Anthony, Willis, Roy, etc.
I just watched the Press Club speech by Vaclav Klaus in Australia yesterday – the journos were picking their jaws up off the floor. In true Aussie vernacular they “looked like a mob of stunned mullets”. Particularly the arrogant p*&%ck from the Financial Revue who tried to pin Vaclav down as saying that the Warmistas were “a communist conspiracy”. President Klaus handled it beautifully. The Fin Revue journo did not even have the grace to clap at the end and show some respect. There has been no further publicity about this that I have heard – complete MSM blackout in Australia. Don’t they realise that the dam will soon burst?
However I despair that these “leaders of fashion” (the journos) won’t be held responsible for their part in the tragedy!
Obviously the model is simplistic, but powerful nonetheless. I gather that they are trying to measure the influence of “singular ideas” rather than complex affiliations. Democrats and Republicans are affilations, composed of multiple ideas, some competing with one another, but often not diametrically opposed. This means that singular ideas can be adopted by the majority once 10% hold them to be true, but those singular ideas can even be somewhat or even almost totally contradictory, and still be held to be true. Which would help explain why so many contradictory ideas seem to be held by the majority, or even within an individual, at the same time. People are not rational, in other words, and they have the capacity to believe in ideas that contradict one another, without being driven “crazy” by the contradictions. This is what cognitive dissonance studies show as well.
This would explain why even scientists can look at a field of data, and interpret them according to a consensus, rather than on the individual merits of each idea that has been affiliated with the core idea. Once the core idea reaches a certain level of commited adherents, even the rest of the ideas that have been incorporated into it get swept along. It also explains why it is so hard to chip away at a large all-encompassing idea like AGW by merely pointing out its evidentiary flaws and failures. As long as the central idea is held in place by a committed core of believers, it continues to be strong. It requires an over-equal core of committed skeptics to dislodge that idea. Or, perhaps skepticism is not enough, it would require a committed core of people believing in an equally all-embracing idea to dislodge it.
I would suggest that the “all embracing idea” which needs a committed core, which could unseat AGW, is “Natural Climate Variation”, or NCV for short.
In Australia we currently have a disastrous political situation in which a fringe element (“The Greens”) have obtained approximately 10% of the primary vote and now exert extremely disproportionate influence.
(Am I guilty of confirmation bias here?)
Gee, I wonder why the Army would fund such research? 😉
You know, I see they have scientific proof of this, but this reminds me of innovation diffusion models. Very slow start, rapid expansion, and then suddenly 100% of people hold the view. But what about the decay of the opinion? How quickly does the opinion decay? Is that uniform? I think that if your goals are short term (army, ahem ahem) not so important, but if you were really interested in the diffusion of opinion, how could you ignore the decay cycle?
Nobody should be concerned about the results of this study, as it leaves out one important factor.
Let’s start with a group who have no idea what two plus two equal.
Take a small subsection and convince them the answere is seven.
Let them loose in the crowd and, according to this experiment, soon everybody will think that two plus two equals seven.
BUT then give them all an opportuinity to test that hypothesis individually, over and over in different conditions.
Slowly first, then in an accellerating avalance, they will a converge on the correct answer.
Men go crazy in herds, but come to their senses, individually.
(from James MacKay, “Extraudinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, written far back in 1875 and still entirely valid.
Lots of crucial IFs, even IIFs, here. Like, talking to two in a row with the opposed opinion is enough to flip someone. The end of the article referring to “polarized” situations is meant to cover the (usual) scene where there are >10% on different sides. So, very limited and artificial applicability.
However, those who object to the growth rate of the <10% group "problem", that is the slow rate that holds in the model UNTIL it reaches 10%, at which point it accelerates.
Uhuh.
This is the sort of `study’ that confirms most scientists must be serious pot-heads.
The Bear wanders back to his cave, to roll something, or other.
Reading about this study leaves me even more tired than before of computer models, and moreso of the absolute faith modern society seems to place in them.
We have raised a generation that believes what computers tell them without question, just as previous generations believed the Church. The operators have become the priests and prophets of this new religion, that worships the very machines we created. (Cue Father Brown and his hallowed halls)
Hm. I’m a programmer. If the computers are the new gods, what does that make me? 🙂
TonyG;
A fabulist.
Preference falsification, eh? Didn’t that used to be called conformity?
Now that AGW has been perceived as a bunch of bs, no amount of paint job/relabeling is going to win back the exodus. Heavy-handed political types and bureaucrats now operate with a public bent on revenge, which has an entirely different time-cycle and behavior.
It is really great to see this empirically validated. I think that this discovery may have been made through the work of MKULTRA many years ago, as I have heard (but can’t say for certain) that it was found if people heard an authority figure say something in excess of three times, even with cognitive dissonance in place, it is hard to avoid believing that statement.
Kip Hansen says:
July 27, 2011 at 6:22 am
“Anyone who played around with automaton ‘bugs’ in computer programming back in the 1970′s will recognize the technique they are reporting….often used in graphic studies of population dynamics. The results are entirely dependent on the ‘rules’ set by the programmer, even though the results can be quite surprising sometimes.”
This is exactly correct. It is simply a result of the rules they chose.
For example, there is an obvious asymmetry here. The ‘traditional’ view starts off with way more than 10% acceptance, and so seems to meet the criteria to “catch fire” and convince everyone. But it doesn’t. The ‘new’ view starts with 10% plus a smidge and it does “catch fire.” So, there must be a difference in the rules for adopting or maintaining views. Most likely, it is simply that the 10% of committed persons CANNOT change their view, but anyone else can be convinced of either view if they encounter the right combination of others (like two people in a row holding the opposite of your current view). Then, it’s easy to imagine a tipping point and a shift to the view bolstered by a critical number of unflappable supporters, when there are no unflappable opponents.
So, in essence, the study assumes that the new view seems at least reasonable to everyone, while the traditional view is completely unreasonable to a dedicated minority. Like the view, “raping virgins cures aids.” One can hope that, “no it doesn’t” becomes the unflappable view of 10%+ of the population at some point, though it may take time. If we further assume that no more than a very small minority finds “no it doesn’t” to be completely unreasonable, then we only need to build that 10%+ group of committed “no it doesn’t” supporters to shift the whole society. BUT we NEED that 10%+ group of COMMITTED supporters.
I think that may be the significance of the study.
Another computer model to join AGW. Ho hum.
SCNARC is an acronym you just couldn’t make up.
This does not seem to cover the dynamic when 10% of the population has one ‘unshakable’ belief and another 10% of the population is 100% sure that the exact opposite is true and there is no commonly accepted basis for resolving the difference. This may be analogous to the situation in Congress now.
I just watched on YouTube the Vaclav Klaus talk mentioned by James Reid above. Highly recommended:
Note the reference at the end to a forthcoming study/modelling of “polarized societies”:
I predict they will predict deadlock followed by blood in the streets.
This study doesn’t consider the truth value of the competing views. What happens if one of the views is deemed ‘true’ and this is backed up by a ‘forcing.’ Like say, every ’round’ all of the ‘uncommitted’ persons, whatever their lightly held current view, have a .0001% chance of having an ‘epiphany’ and becoming committed to the ‘true’ view. Maybe we should also allow persons committed to an ‘untrue’ view to have epiphanies.