Decades of work in sociology, physics, and other disciplines have supported this idea. Small groups of people can indeed flip firmly established social conventions, as long as they reach a certain critical mass. When that happens, what was once acceptable can quickly become unacceptable, and vice versa. Two decades ago, most Americans opposed gay marriage, bans on public smoking, and the legalization of marijuana; now, these issues all enjoy majority support. [...]
After running a creative experiment, Damon Centola from the University of Pennsylvania says that the crucial threshold is more like 25 percent. That’s the likely tipping point at which minority views can overturn majority ones. “A lot of models have been developed, but they’re often people speculating in the dark, and writing equations without any data,” Centola says. “Our results fit better with the ethnographic data. It’s really exciting to me how clearly they resonate with Kanter’s work.” [...]
He stresses that the 25 percent figure isn’t universal, and will likely vary depending on the circumstances. Indeed, the stakes in his experiment were very low. Volunteers jostled over arbitrary norms, rather than, say, politically charged beliefs. And both the established group and the incoming activists had similar amounts of power—something that’s rarely the case in real life. [...]
This isn’t necessarily an uplifting message, Centola stresses. “It’s really important to be aware of how easily populations can be co-opted by people with an agenda,” he says. Russian-linked Facebook accounts bought a significant number of ads that targeted U.S. voters during the 2016 presidential election. The voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica used information from millions of people on Facebook to create psychographic profiles, and then used those to target ads supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Brexit “Leave” campaign. The Chinese government has been seeding groups of activists into online communities to subtly shift discussions towards national pride, and to distract from collective grievances. (“We’re now looking at times in which these activists became more active to see if they reached this 25 percent threshold,” Centola says.)
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