Role of Committed Minorities in Times of Crisis

TL;DR

This paper uses a cooperative decision-making model to show how small, committed minorities can significantly influence social consensus during crises by leveraging long-range correlations in group behavior.

Contribution

It demonstrates how committed minorities can induce large-scale social change during crises through a phase-transition mechanism in a CDM model.

Findings

Small minorities can sway social consensus during crises.

Long-range correlations facilitate minority influence.

Crisis states resemble criticality in the model.

Abstract

We use a Cooperative Decision Making (CDM) model to study the effect of committed minorities on group behavior in time of crisis. The CDM model has been shown to generate consensus through a phase-transition process that at criticality establishes long-range correlations among the individuals within a model society. In a condition of high consensus, the correlation function vanishes, thereby making the network recover the ordinary locality condition. However, this state is not permanent and times of crisis occur when there is an ambiguity concerning a given social issue. The correlation function within the cooperative system becomes similarly extended as it is observed at criticality. This combination of independence (free will) and long-range correlation makes it possible for very small but committed minorities to produce substantial changes in social consensus.