Social tipping point

For norm change to occur, there needs to be a social wave of individuals that moves against the status quo; for instance, against the ban on same-sex marriage and for the normalisation of being gay. If the group that mobilizes is large and visible, the social cost for embracing a new behaviour decreases and eventually reverses. A social tipping point occurs (e.g. Schelling 1978, Bicchieri 2016, Centola et al. 2018). An illustration of such a process is the rapidly increasing number of people in 2013 who signalled their support for same-sex marriage using red equal signs, and later rainbow flags, on their social-media profiles.

Historical data clearly documents instances of sudden social change (e.g. Kuran 1991, Jones 2009, Amato et al. 2018). These data, however, do not permit us to identify models that can predict social tipping. This is problematic, as it is difficult to know if social norms accurately reflect societal attitudes at any given point in time, or whether there is a hysteresis which could call for an intervention to stimulate change. Recently, researchers started using experiments in controlled laboratories to study the process of social change (e.g., Centola et al. 2017, Smerdon et al. 2019, Bicchieri et al. 2020). In a new study (Andreon, Nikiforakis and Siegenthaler 2021), we present evidence from a large-scale lab experiment designed to test and empirically validate a widely used theoretical class of model for social tipping: threshold models.

Threshold models assume that an individual’s willingness to deviate from a social norm depends on the proportion of others in the society that previously deviated from it. A society reaches a ‘tipping threshold’ when the proportion of people deviating from the norm becomes large enough that even individuals who are risk averse, conformist, or have pessimistic expectations about the prospects of change have an incentive to follow suit (e.g. Granovetter 1978, Schelling 1978, Efferson et al. 2020).