Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas
ScienceDaily (July 26, 2011) — 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.
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Phys. Rev. E 84, 011130 (2011) [8 pages]
Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities
J. Xie1, S. Sreenivasan1,2,*, G. Korniss2, W. Zhang3, C. Lim3, and B. K. Szymanski1
1Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180, USA
2Department of Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180, USA
3Department of Mathematics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180, USA
Received 17 February 2011; revised 25 April 2011; published 22 July 2011
We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc≈10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the timeTc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion. In particular, for complete graphs we show that when ppc, Tc~lnN. We conclude with simulation results for Erdős-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior.
©2011 American Physical Society
URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.84.011130
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.84.011130
PACS: 02.50.Le, 87.23.Ge, 89.75.Hc
*Corresponding author: sreens@rpi.edu
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
Quer dizer então que, cientificamente, a opinião de uma minoria é que prevalece? Os teóricos do Design Inteligente seriam considerados uma minoria? A TDI seria cientificamente aceita conforme prescreve este artigo científico???
