The role of committed
minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help
of multiagent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous
populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness.
Here we
consider the more general case in which individuals are characterized by
different propensities to communicate. In particular, we correlate commitment
with a higher tendency to push an opinion, acknowledging the fact that
individuals with unwavering dedication to a cause are also more active in their
attempts to promote their message.
We show that these activists are not only more
efficient in spreading their message but that their efforts require an order of
magnitude fewer individuals than a randomly selected committed minority to
bring the population over to a new consensus.
Finally, we address the role of
communities, showing that partisan divisions in the society can make it harder
for committed individuals to flip the status-quo social consensus.
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By:
- 1Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
- 2Centre for Business Network Analysis, University of Greenwich, Park Row, London SE10 9LS, United Kingdom.
- 3Department of Mathematics, City University London, London EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
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