The first shall be last: selection-driven minority becomes majority

TL;DR

This paper investigates how local interactions in small groups can lead to a large-scale consensus in social demonstrations, proposing an agent-based model to understand the underlying selection dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agent-based model that explains the emergence of macroscopic consensus from microscopic opinion changes driven by local interactions and selection rules.

Findings

Local group meetings influence opinion shifts.

A natural selection mechanism promotes minority opinions to become majority.

Macroscopic consensus emerges from microscopic interactions.

Abstract

Street demonstrations occur across the world. In Rio de Janeiro, June/July 2013, they reach beyond one million people. A wrathful reader of \textit{O Globo}, leading newspaper in the same city, published a letter \cite{OGlobo} where many social questions are stated and answered Yes or No. These million people of street demonstrations share opinion consensus about a similar set of social issues. But they did not reach this consensus within such a huge numbered meetings. Earlier, they have met in diverse small groups where some of them could be convinced to change mind by other few fellows. Suddenly, a macroscopic consensus emerges. Many other big manifestations are widespread all over the world in recent times, and are supposed to remain in the future. The interesting questions are: 1) How a binary-option opinion distributed among some population evolves in time, through local changes occurred within small-group meetings? and 2) Is there some natural selection rule acting upon? Here, we address these questions through an agent-based model.