Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas 283
An anonymous reader writes "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. '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. 'Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.' The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E."
The actual paper (Score:5, Informative)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3931 [arxiv.org]
The Abstract (Score:5, Informative)
seems a lot more reasonable than the article/summary:
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 pcâ10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc 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 ErdÅ's-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior.
Re:I don't think so (Score:4, Informative)
Its actually 9.789% if you read the paper
think zombies, not ideas (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that this article badly summarizes the results of computer modeling that is supposed to represent human interactions. Apparently the tipping point for their simulation is 10%. Without seeing the actual original research findings, it is difficult to see if this actually matters, but the available article seems to say that the 10% is irrespective of network structure.
The computer simulation seems more analogous to a disease outbreak than to an idea. Imagine a percentage of people are zombies. They can only attack their friends, who can fight them so long as they have more living than dead friends nearby (I am assuming here that it is 51% that is needed to change status, but who knows what the actual research used). If they don't, then they switch sides and spread the outbreak. So the simulation might be saying that if 10% of people are initially zombies, then mankind is generally doomed. If it is less, then the outbreak will be contained.
I also find it interesting that the study was funded by the military.
Re:Did ayone read the paper? (Score:5, Informative)
In short, the paper repeats analysis and numerical simulations of a simplified 'agreement model'. People are abstracted as nodes on a graph, communication happens between them, and consensus is reached. If a graph is initialized randomly, with nodes 'believing' either A or B, eventually (in log(N) time) the graph reaches consensus with every node 'believing' A xor B.
This paper adds a twist; some fraction of nodes are 'committed' to A, and cannot ever be convinced of B. To quote the paper:
Now, if even one node cannot be convinced of B, then no consensus can be reached -- but it doesn't really matter. If the fraction is really small, then you can more or less ignore them.
The interesting part about that paper is their threshold effect -- once p gets to be over 10%, not only does A eventually win, but it does so -quickly-.
The applications to politics still hold, but not on the big, obvious issues. Those issues, like taxes and abortion and health care and anything else that really makes the news, have committed believers on both sides -- they're outside the scope of study. Where this research becomes really interesting is in quieter, uncontroversial issues -- like regulation details, or climage change before Al Gore. There, this research suggests that the influence of sockpuppetry and lobbying is nonlinear -- beyond a critical point, the lobbyists completely win.
Of course, caveats about "the real world isn't an abstract graph" apply.