A small, inflexible minority can impose its preferences on a flexible majority, because the majority can accommodate it cheaply and the minority will not accommodate the majority.
Taleb set it out in a 2016 essay and in Skin in the Game (2018). His example is food: if a small share of a population will eat only kosher or halal food and the rest do not mind, producers find it simpler to make everything compliant. The asymmetry of preferences, not the size of the group, decides the outcome.
In practice
- Ten friends choosing a restaurant end up, every time, where the one vegan can eat.
- A company makes its whole product line meet the strictest single market's rules rather than run two versions.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is cost: accommodating an inflexible minority costs the flexible little, while ignoring it loses the minority altogether. Another is tipping: a committed minority above a threshold can shift a convention.
- In its favour
- Consistent with experiments in which a committed minority of about a quarter changed a group's social convention (Centola and colleagues, 2018), and with the regulatory spread known as the Brussels effect.
- Against it
- Taleb's examples are mostly anecdotal, and many inflexible minorities impose nothing because accommodating them is costly. The threshold at which a minority tips a group varies widely.
- Standing
- Compare complex contagion and the tipping point.
- Subject
- Networks & Collective Behavior
- Essay
- How connections shape what crowds do