Flipping Quarters
Flipping Quarters
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Interesting, for both good and evil purposes. "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 [...] 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.”
[...]
“What I think is happening at the threshold is that there’s a pretty high probability that a noncommitted actor”—a person who can be swayed in any direction—“will encounter a majority of committed minority actors, and flip to join them,” says Pamela Oliver, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There is therefore a good probability that enough non-committed actors will all flip at the same time that the whole system will flip.”
[...]
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.)"
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/the-tipping-point-when-minority-views-take-over/562307/
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Interesting, for both good and evil purposes. "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 [...] 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.”
[...]
“What I think is happening at the threshold is that there’s a pretty high probability that a noncommitted actor”—a person who can be swayed in any direction—“will encounter a majority of committed minority actors, and flip to join them,” says Pamela Oliver, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There is therefore a good probability that enough non-committed actors will all flip at the same time that the whole system will flip.”
[...]
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.)"
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/the-tipping-point-when-minority-views-take-over/562307/
I was going along with this until the author brought in Brexit and Facebook memes supposedly affecting the U.S. election, neither of which are examples of the stated phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteWell, communications and sociology and the wisdom of crowds, right?
ReplyDeleteBut the research is specifically about changing majority opinion, and neither of those votes demonstrated any significant shift in public thinking. Either vote could just as easily have gone the other way and very nearly did; the public was simply more evenly divided than pundits wanted to admit. All Cambridge Analytica was trying to do was shift a few votes on the margin, and it's not at all clear they even succeeded at that. The author bringing them into this discussion is senseless.
ReplyDeleteYes, well, sociology is often about trends and viewpoints, rather than predictive science.
ReplyDeleteAnd, there is a strong desire to understand how we got here.
Remember when the "generation gap"' was used to explain things?