Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Centola Et Al, 2018. Experimental Evidence For Tipping Points in Social Convention PDF
Centola Et Al, 2018. Experimental Evidence For Tipping Points in Social Convention PDF
SOCIAL SCIENCE broad practical (18, 19) and scientific (1, 12)
importance of understanding the dynamics of
critical mass in collective behavior, it has not
Experimental evidence for tipping been possible to identify whether there are in
fact tipping points in empirical systems because
Fig. 3. Final success levels from and there are clear expectations and rewards for
all trials (gray points indicate trials social coordination among peers—the process of
with C < 25%; black points indicate normative changes in social conventions may be
trials with C ≥ 25%. Also shown well described by the dynamics of critical mass.
is the theoretically predicted critical The design choices that aided our control of
mass point (solid line) with 95% the study also put constraints on the behaviors
confidence intervals (N = 24, T = 45, that we could test. Our experimental design pro-
M = 12; gray area indicates 95% con- vided subjects with social and financial incen-
fidence intervals from 1000 replications). tives that strongly favored coordinating on an
The dotted line indicates C = 25%. established social convention (25). However, in
The theoretical model of critical mass the real world, individuals’ emotional and psy-
provides a good approximation of the chological commitments to established behav-
empirical findings. For short time periods iors can create additional resistance to behavior
(T < 100 interactions), the critical mass change (31). To further explore these expecta-
prediction is not exact (ranging from 20% tions, supplementary analyses of our theoretical
< C < 30% of the population); however, model (fig. S7) (25) extend our basic predictions
over longer time periods (T > 1000) the transition dynamics become more precise (solid line, 25). to consider how the critical mass size may differ
under conditions of greater social entrenchment.
When actors are more conservative—exhibiting an
(9, 20, 23). In every group, this interaction pro- the majority of the population within the ex- explicit bias in favor of the established convention
cess quickly led to the establishment of a group- perimental window of observation (Figs. 2 (based on a skewed best-response calculation
and 3). Over all trials, populations with C ≥ 25%
(iii) the appropriate kinds of content to share 17. S. Grey, Polit. Gend. 2, 492–502 (2006). 35. E. L. Paluck, H. Shepherd, P. M. Aronow, Proc. Natl. Acad.
with strangers over social media (36), all of 18. G. Marwell, P. Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action Sci. U.S.A. 113, 566–571 (2016).
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). 36. C. Shih, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to
which have been suggested to exhibit suscep- Market, Sell, and Innovate (Pearson Education, 2010).
19. K. Nyborg et al., Science 354, 42–43 (2016).
tibility to shifts in conventional behavior as a 20. D. Centola, A. Baronchelli, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112,
result of the activity of a small fraction of the 1989–1994 (2015). AC KNOWLED GME NTS
population (19, 34, 36). 21. D. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Harvard Univ. We gratefully acknowledge research assistance from S. Kim
Press, Cambridge, 1969). and N. Herbert, helpful suggestions from P. Starr and
22. C. Castellano, S. Fortunato, V. Loreto, Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 591 A. van de Rijt, and programming assistance from A. Wagner
RE FE RENCES AND N OT ES (2009). and R. Overbey. This research was approved by the Institutional
1. T. Kuran, Am. J. Sociol. 100, 1528–1551 (1995). 23. S. Garrod, G. Doherty, Cognition 53, 181–215 (1994). Review Board at the University of Pennsylvania, where the
2. K. D. Opp, C. Gern, Am. Sociol. Rev. 58, 659–680 (1993). 24. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (John Wiley & Sons, study was conducted, and it included informed consent by all
3. R. M. Kanter, Am. J. Sociol. 82, 965–990 (1977). 2009). participants in the study. Funding: The authors received
4. D. Dahlerup, L. Freidenvall, Int. Fem. J. Polit. 7, 26–48 25. Materials and methods are available as supplementary no external funding in support of this research. Author
(2005). materials. contributions: D.C. and A.B. designed the study. J.B. and
5. S. Bikhchandani, D. Hirshleifer, I. Welch, J. Polit. Econ. 100, 26. A. Baronchelli, M. Felici, V. Loreto, E. Caglioti, L. Steels, J. Stat. D.B. collected the data. D.C., J.B., D.B., and A.B. analyzed
992–1026 (1992). Mech. Theory Exp. 2006, P06014 (2006). the data. D.C. wrote the manuscript. All authors commented
6. T. Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social 27. D. Centola, Science 334, 1269–1272 (2011). on and approved the final manuscript. Competing interests:
Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard Univ. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
28. D. Centola, Science 329, 1194–1197 (2010).
Press, 1997). Data and materials availability: The datasets are available
29. L. Backstrom, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg, X. Lan, Group
7. J. C. Harsanyi, R. Selten, A General Theory of Equilibrium upon request and upon publication will be publicly available
formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and
Selection in Games (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988). for download from the university Web site: http://ndg.asc.upenn.
evolution. Proc. 12th ACM SIGKDD Int. Conf. Knowl. Discov.
8. J. F. Nash, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 36, 48–49 (1950). edu/experiments/creating-critical-mass. Upon publication,
Data Min., 44–54 (2006).
9. H. P. Young, Econometrica J. Econom. Soc. 61, 57–84 the data will be available at Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/11HUAG.
(1993). 30. F. Kooti, H. Yang, M. Cha, P. K. Gummadi, W. A. Mason, The
The code in R is available on GitHub at https://github.com/
10. M. Kandori, G. J. Mailath, R. Rob, Econometrica J. Econom. Soc. Emergence of Conventions in Online Social Networks. Proc.
NetworkDynamicsGroup/BestResponseNameGame.
Sixth Int. AAAI Conf. Weblogs Soc. Media ICWSM 2012
SUPPLEMENTARY http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2018/06/06/360.6393.1116.DC1
MATERIALS
REFERENCES This article cites 25 articles, 7 of which you can access for free
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1116#BIBL
PERMISSIONS http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions
Science (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. 2017 © The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive
licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. The title
Science is a registered trademark of AAAS.