The most moderate members leave a group first, so each departure radicalises the remainder and prompts the next.
Yudkowsky's 2007 term. The mechanism is selection: whoever is least committed finds each successive position hardest to accept, so departures are ordered by moderation.
In practice
- A campaign group's most pragmatic organiser resigns, which makes the next meeting less pragmatic, which prompts the next resignation.
- A book club that reads increasingly demanding texts loses its casual members, which frees it to choose harder texts.
- Standing
- The belief-dynamics counterpart of the Dead Sea effect.
- Subject
- Networks & Collective Behavior
- Essay
- How connections shape what crowds do