Executive summary: Social behavior curves model how people’s actions depend on others’ behavior, revealing insights about persuasion, radicalism, and rapid cultural shifts.
Key points:
Social behavior curves plot the percentage of others doing something vs. an individual’s willingness to do it, showing equilibria and potential for cascading changes.
Small shifts in curves through persuasion can sometimes trigger large societal changes by displacing equilibria.
The shape of curves matters greatly for activists—S-curves may explain rapid shifts in social attitudes on some issues.
Ideal curves balance allowing exploration of new ideas with social cohesion, suggesting society needs both radicals and conformists.
Understanding these dynamics can inform activism strategy and personal choices about how radical to be on issues.
The author provocatively suggests randomly choosing how radical to be on issues due to uncertainty about existing social dynamics.
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Executive summary: Social behavior curves model how people’s actions depend on others’ behavior, revealing insights about persuasion, radicalism, and rapid cultural shifts.
Key points:
Social behavior curves plot the percentage of others doing something vs. an individual’s willingness to do it, showing equilibria and potential for cascading changes.
Small shifts in curves through persuasion can sometimes trigger large societal changes by displacing equilibria.
The shape of curves matters greatly for activists—S-curves may explain rapid shifts in social attitudes on some issues.
Ideal curves balance allowing exploration of new ideas with social cohesion, suggesting society needs both radicals and conformists.
Understanding these dynamics can inform activism strategy and personal choices about how radical to be on issues.
The author provocatively suggests randomly choosing how radical to be on issues due to uncertainty about existing social dynamics.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.