10% Influence Rule on Social Networks

Don't know if anybody saw this study on how influence works on different social network structures, but its very interesting:

In a study of networking, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY developed computer models showing that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, that belief will be adopted by the majority of society. Their study of minority belief becoming majority opinion appears in the July 22, 2011 online edition of the journal Physical Review E.

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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. Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.

More interestingly, they modelled how it spreads on different social network structures and found that the type of network and the location where an opinion starts and spreads in society have little bearing on the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion. To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks.

- One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network.
- The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders.
The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders.

Each of these individuals held a view but was also, importantly, open-minded to other views. The human dynamic is something like this:

In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus.

As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change. People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further.

I recall research about 20 years ago (can't find it now of course) that said once about 10% of a population cheat, then its nearly impossible to stop cheating proliferating. Also, early Memetic Artificlal Life models showed that once an idea had "infected" about 5% of a population in a clustered aea it was very hard to eradicate as they kept on reinfecting each other, and at about 8 - 10% it started to become viral.

This is no doubt something that will be used for good and evil in the coming years.