What percentage is needed for the 'minority to upset common sense'?



There are majority and minority in various points in the world, and minority people tend to feel cramped by being bound by common sense and customs, but sometimes the minority changes the world and conventional common sense It may turn over.

Iacopo Iacopini , a researcher on social networks and urban systems at Central European University in Hungary, shares research findings on the question, 'How much do minorities need to upset common sense?' I am explaining.

Group interactions modulate critical mass dynamics in social convention
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10411

How can minorities of regular individuals overturn social conventions? | Iacopo Iacopini
https://iaciac.github.io/post/vanishing/

Critical mass is a threshold that indicates the threshold at which the penetration rate of products and services in the marketing field jumps at a stretch, and also refers to the threshold at which the presence in the social system becomes a group with a non-negligible influence. Based on this theory, once the minority reaches the critical mass, its influence will be solid and it will be possible to overturn stable social common sense and customs.

Some research has been conducted on the question, 'How much percentage of the minority should be the critical mass?', And 30% of the critical mass is to close the gender gap among corporate leaders. Research results and research results such as 40% of the critical mass regarding gender are reported. In addition, a 2018 study showed that 'when the size of minorities positive for social change reaches 25%, we can change norms such as workplaces and online communities.'

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Quantitative research on the dynamism of the minority's transformation of society uses the 'Naming Game' model. As the name implies, a naming game is a simulation of the process of naming things and forming the meaning of words in a group, and the agents are called 'Speaker' and 'Hearer' in a network without central control. The purpose is to acquire a common meaning in the group based on communication.

A 2011 study using a naming game showed that a minority of 10% could change the 'meaning of words' for the entire population. As a result of similar research conducted after generalizing the conditions, it is said that the critical mass changes between about 10 to 40%, and in the 2018 study incorporating social cooperation, `` 25 of the population'' The theoretical prediction of the critical mass of '%' was obtained.

However, these theoretical models and empirical studies have considered 'fully committed individuals,' that is, minorities who do not follow the majority under any circumstances. Given that, even 10% of the population is difficult to consider as a minority, but in reality there are cases where social and normative changes have been triggered by groups of only a few dozen people. Therefore, Iacopini's research team focused on the question, 'How will the critical mass increase?'

The research team adopted the naming game used in previous studies and changed various conditions to investigate the variety of scenarios. The results show that critical mass is dramatically reduced under the condition that 'uncommitted members are unlikely to return their views due to social impact after accepting new rules.' That.

In the figure below, blue shows the norm of the majority, orange shows the norm of the minority, and 'A, B, C, D, E' shows the change of the minority and the majority over time. increase. From the figure below, it can be seen that even a small number can change the norms of the entire group with time, and the required critical mass is only 0.3%.



In changing social norms, various requirements affect the outcome, in addition to the degree to which uncommitted members change their opinions. 'This result reconciles the large number of observations that committed minorities can rapidly change social beliefs with the apparent difficulty of establishing large-scale minorities,' said Iacopini. rice field.

in Science, Posted by log1h_ik