“When the minority viewpoint made up at least 25% of the population, it was likely to rapidly become the majority viewpoint….”* That’s how Roni Dengler reports the finding of Damon Centola, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist. And here’s the “kicker”: According to Yale sociologist Emily Erikson’s interpretation of Centola’s finding, personal preference is “’not just about what individuals want.’”
That’s a scary thought. “We're being manipulated,” I say.
You say, “No, maybe you are, but I’m an independent thinker. People only acquiesce to others’ thinking when they are already inclined to do so. If you have firm convictions and solid reasoning…well, you won’t just follow the dictates of a burgeoning crowd. I stay clear of mobs and mobthink. No one tells me how to think.”
“Maybe,” I respond. “Gotta be something to Centola’s study. He ran a simulation via a computer game with a couple of hundred participants, and the 25%-plateau appeared to be the tipping point for a minority opinion’s rapid spread through a population. Of course, that was an experiment. Centola had controls. In the ‘real world’ such controls are virtually impossible because of potential chaos in the system, that is, because of unknowns interacting, such as the effect of authorities, traditions, and new circumstances or events introduced from without. The ‘real world’ isn’t a closed system for long. Someone in North Korea, for example, is going to find out that the people in South Korea have greater wealth and freedom. Ideas from without can disrupt ideas that lie within. Some people fled Nazi Germany as Hitler rose to power after the a Nazi way of thinking reached a tipping point. But give Centola some credit for the experiment. He’s given us a new way to examine our opinions and the actions they engender.”
“Still,” you say, “you make the argument against his finding when you point to the open system of opinion. In a free society, I’m under no obligation, so I don’t have to follow anyone.”
“Yes, but tipping points seem to have some historical validation. Ever fish for steelhead trout in Lake Michigan? Okay, I haven’t either, but if either of us were to fish for the fish, we would be demonstrating that tipping points are easily reached when there’s an innate penchant to do so. In 1893, people introduced California’s anadromous trout into the lake to enhance fishing there. If you recall from your ichthyology class, such fish, like salmon, can live their adult lives in the ocean, but can return to fresh water rivers to breed. They’ve got some control over that osmosis process built in that enables them to move between salt and fresh water. Well, according to a genetic study by Mark Christie of Purdue in West Lafayette, and Janna Willoughby, some of the introduced steelhead survived the move and adapted.** Freshwater fish need to take in salt, whereas saltwater fish need to eliminate it. Anyway, within a century, the steelhead introduced into the lake adapted in a rapid evolutionary jump. Within a hundred years there was a big change, but the geneticists think that change was brought on by genes already present in the fish, genes that switched on.
“So, here’s my take on Centola’s study. Every opinion, if taken to its extreme, seems to reach its antithesis. There are certainly enough revolutions that begin Leftist and turn, to protect their gains, Rightest. Think Cuba, Venezuela, and 1920’s Russia. Think of what Marx and Engels have wrought. Didn’t they envision an eventual society that needed no overarching government, a peaceful, cooperative society? Some 100 million deaths later, we can see how their ideal became a horrible real. Look at the exodus of people from Venezuela in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But sometime in their past before the switch to communism, enough people in these countries, probably about 25%, convinced the majority that they were on the right path to a better life.
“Now you’re probably thinking that I’m off target, off topic. But there were in the pre-revolution stages, the idealists who were in the minority and who had to work to get to the tipping point. When they reached it, the population favored them and adopted their thinking because there was, in fact, something of the truth in what they advocated, something that lies in everyone’s mind: That no matter what the current status is, there’s always a desire for things to be ‘better.’ In other words, we hold antithetical thoughts as we ride a teetertotter. When the opinion-holders on the other side reach just the right weight, they can tip the board the other way.
“Tipping points are real, it seems. Take the recent study of rocks in Ethiopia by Scott Maclennan.*** We have good evidence that Earth has on occasion become ice-covered. Not talkin’ Northern Hemisphere. I’m saying thewholeEarth, even the tropics. And Maclenann’s study suggests that a ‘snowball Earth’ occurred rapidly 717 million years ago when a tipping point was reached. That tipping point? Apparently, when ice cover reaches 30 degrees latitude, it’s destined to expand rapidly all the way to the Equator because ice reflects sunlight (changes the albedo of the surface) more than rock and water (Earth had no land plants 717 million years ago). That planetwide glacial event might have been as rapid as 1,000 years after the 30-degree-latitude tipping point was reached.
“So,” I say, getting back to Centola’s study, “it seems that tipping points can lead to very rapid changes: Steelhead trout in a century and the whole planet in a millennium. Now, imagine, the effect in people. I think it’s genuine. I think I might be manipulated without my knowing it, and I think the expression attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’
“We’re all, I hate to say it, a bit like steelhead trout. We can be transferred to a lake of opinion where we’ll adapt to think the ecology is normal because somewhere within, we all hold the gene of opposing opinion or a gene that finds it convenient to switch its purpose as survival and convenience—or social pressures—warrant.”
*Dengler, Roni, How minority viewpoints become majority ones, Sciencemag.org, June 7, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/how-minority-viewpoints-become-majority-ones
**Pennisi, Elizabeth, This saltwater trout evolved to live I freshwater—in just 100 years, Sciencemag.org, June 1, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/saltwater-trout-evolved-live-fresh-water-just-100-years
***Joel, Lucas, Ancient Earth froze over in a geologic instant, Science mag.org, June 7, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/ancient-earth-froze-over-geologic-instant
That’s a scary thought. “We're being manipulated,” I say.
You say, “No, maybe you are, but I’m an independent thinker. People only acquiesce to others’ thinking when they are already inclined to do so. If you have firm convictions and solid reasoning…well, you won’t just follow the dictates of a burgeoning crowd. I stay clear of mobs and mobthink. No one tells me how to think.”
“Maybe,” I respond. “Gotta be something to Centola’s study. He ran a simulation via a computer game with a couple of hundred participants, and the 25%-plateau appeared to be the tipping point for a minority opinion’s rapid spread through a population. Of course, that was an experiment. Centola had controls. In the ‘real world’ such controls are virtually impossible because of potential chaos in the system, that is, because of unknowns interacting, such as the effect of authorities, traditions, and new circumstances or events introduced from without. The ‘real world’ isn’t a closed system for long. Someone in North Korea, for example, is going to find out that the people in South Korea have greater wealth and freedom. Ideas from without can disrupt ideas that lie within. Some people fled Nazi Germany as Hitler rose to power after the a Nazi way of thinking reached a tipping point. But give Centola some credit for the experiment. He’s given us a new way to examine our opinions and the actions they engender.”
“Still,” you say, “you make the argument against his finding when you point to the open system of opinion. In a free society, I’m under no obligation, so I don’t have to follow anyone.”
“Yes, but tipping points seem to have some historical validation. Ever fish for steelhead trout in Lake Michigan? Okay, I haven’t either, but if either of us were to fish for the fish, we would be demonstrating that tipping points are easily reached when there’s an innate penchant to do so. In 1893, people introduced California’s anadromous trout into the lake to enhance fishing there. If you recall from your ichthyology class, such fish, like salmon, can live their adult lives in the ocean, but can return to fresh water rivers to breed. They’ve got some control over that osmosis process built in that enables them to move between salt and fresh water. Well, according to a genetic study by Mark Christie of Purdue in West Lafayette, and Janna Willoughby, some of the introduced steelhead survived the move and adapted.** Freshwater fish need to take in salt, whereas saltwater fish need to eliminate it. Anyway, within a century, the steelhead introduced into the lake adapted in a rapid evolutionary jump. Within a hundred years there was a big change, but the geneticists think that change was brought on by genes already present in the fish, genes that switched on.
“So, here’s my take on Centola’s study. Every opinion, if taken to its extreme, seems to reach its antithesis. There are certainly enough revolutions that begin Leftist and turn, to protect their gains, Rightest. Think Cuba, Venezuela, and 1920’s Russia. Think of what Marx and Engels have wrought. Didn’t they envision an eventual society that needed no overarching government, a peaceful, cooperative society? Some 100 million deaths later, we can see how their ideal became a horrible real. Look at the exodus of people from Venezuela in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But sometime in their past before the switch to communism, enough people in these countries, probably about 25%, convinced the majority that they were on the right path to a better life.
“Now you’re probably thinking that I’m off target, off topic. But there were in the pre-revolution stages, the idealists who were in the minority and who had to work to get to the tipping point. When they reached it, the population favored them and adopted their thinking because there was, in fact, something of the truth in what they advocated, something that lies in everyone’s mind: That no matter what the current status is, there’s always a desire for things to be ‘better.’ In other words, we hold antithetical thoughts as we ride a teetertotter. When the opinion-holders on the other side reach just the right weight, they can tip the board the other way.
“Tipping points are real, it seems. Take the recent study of rocks in Ethiopia by Scott Maclennan.*** We have good evidence that Earth has on occasion become ice-covered. Not talkin’ Northern Hemisphere. I’m saying thewholeEarth, even the tropics. And Maclenann’s study suggests that a ‘snowball Earth’ occurred rapidly 717 million years ago when a tipping point was reached. That tipping point? Apparently, when ice cover reaches 30 degrees latitude, it’s destined to expand rapidly all the way to the Equator because ice reflects sunlight (changes the albedo of the surface) more than rock and water (Earth had no land plants 717 million years ago). That planetwide glacial event might have been as rapid as 1,000 years after the 30-degree-latitude tipping point was reached.
“So,” I say, getting back to Centola’s study, “it seems that tipping points can lead to very rapid changes: Steelhead trout in a century and the whole planet in a millennium. Now, imagine, the effect in people. I think it’s genuine. I think I might be manipulated without my knowing it, and I think the expression attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’
“We’re all, I hate to say it, a bit like steelhead trout. We can be transferred to a lake of opinion where we’ll adapt to think the ecology is normal because somewhere within, we all hold the gene of opposing opinion or a gene that finds it convenient to switch its purpose as survival and convenience—or social pressures—warrant.”
*Dengler, Roni, How minority viewpoints become majority ones, Sciencemag.org, June 7, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/how-minority-viewpoints-become-majority-ones
**Pennisi, Elizabeth, This saltwater trout evolved to live I freshwater—in just 100 years, Sciencemag.org, June 1, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/saltwater-trout-evolved-live-fresh-water-just-100-years
***Joel, Lucas, Ancient Earth froze over in a geologic instant, Science mag.org, June 7, 2018. Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/ancient-earth-froze-over-geologic-instant
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