Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities

Abstract

We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value p_c \approx 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time, T_c, taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion. In particular, for complete graphs we show that when p < p_c, T_c \sim \exp(α(p)N), while for p > p_c, T_c \sim \ln N. We conclude with simulation results for Erdős-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior.

9 pages, 5 figures