Minority Influence on Social Change

The major focus of our lab is to investigate how minority voices spread to the society and change social norms and cultural practices. Our research aims to (a) identify various social psychological mechanisms of minority influence; (b) connect how different psychological micro-mechanisms of minority influence generate different macro-patterns of social change. To study this topic rigorously, our team uses group experiments, social and psychological network analysis, agent-based modeling, and computer simulations.

Indirect Minority Influence

Our research suggests that the majority’s open-minded and tolerant listening to minority dissenting voices can gradually spread minority voices to society (Jung, 2023). This manifests through the cumulative iterations of indirect minority influence (Moscovici et al., 1969, 1980), a type of minority influence via attitude change in a related issue first, then in a focal issue through an internal consistency between the related and focal issues (Crano, 2010; Wood et al., 1994).

Key findings include:

Gradual and coordinated change: Tolerance-induced indirect minority influence can gradually spread minority voices to society and bring them into equal standing with the status quo ideology (Jung & Bramson, 2014; 2016; Jung, Bramson, & Crano, 2018). The pattern of social change is characterized as a coordinated change where beliefs in multiple issues change together and emerge a new zeitgeist (Jung, Page, & Miller, 2017; 2021).
Tipping dynamics: Tolerance toward minority dissents must reach a certain threshold to tip the system toward social change (Jung et al., 2018).
Patterns of psychological and social change: The combination of tolerance and social network topology generates distinct patterns of belief dynamics. (a) When society is prejudiced and people are connected within parochial networks, societal belief distribution becomes homogenized and the cognitive belief system becomes disconnected and incoherent. (b) As society becomes more tolerant reaching a tipping point and people in different groups become more connected to display small-world characteristics, societal belief distribution becomes polarized and the cognitive belief system becomes coherent and rigid. (c) Then, as society becomes just slightly more tolerant or people in different groups get further connected, societal belief distribution becomes diversified and the cognitive belief system becomes coherent yet malleable (Jung et al., 2021).

This model is the first agent-based model that formalizes the dual process of minority-majority influence documented in social psychology literature. Although our society would reach a tipping point of tolerance, belief polarization would occur if social connections are inadequate. These findings imply that interventions should focus on tolerance and social connections to advance toward a pluralistic society.

Publications

Jung, J. (2025). An Agent-Based Model of Indirect Minority Influence on Social Change (Version 1.0.0). CoMSES Computational Model Library. Retrieved from: https://www.comses.net/codebases/7136f043-2149-47c5-9540-220db008b18c/releases/1.0.0/
Jung, J. (2024). Researching Minority Influence on Social Change and Diversity Using Agent-Based Modeling. Sage Research Methods. SAGE Publications.
Jung, J. (2023). Two dual-categorization theories of tolerance: Commentary on Simon (2023). American Psychologist, 78, 745–747.
Jung, J., Bramson, A., Crano, W., Page, S., Miller, J. H. (2021). Cultural drift, indirect minority influence, network structure, and their impacts on cultural change and diversity. American Psychologist, 76, 1039‒1053. [supplement]
Jung, J., Page, S. E., & Miller, J. H. (2017). Minority and diversity: Extension of indirect minority influence model. In Proceedings of the 2017 conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.
Jung, J., Page, S. E., Miller, J. H., Bramson, A., & Crano, W. D. (2018). The impact of indirect minority influence on diversity of opinion and the magnitude, speed, andfrequency of social change. In Proceedings of the 2018 conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.
Jung, J., Bramson, A., & Crano, W. D. (2018). An agent-based model of indirect minority influence on social change and diversity. Social Influence, 13, 18‒38.
Jung, J. & Bramson, A. (2016). A recipe for social change: Indirect minority influence and cognitive rebalancing. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.
Jung, J. & Bramson, A. (2014). An agent-based model of indirect minority influence on social change. In H. Sayama, J. Rieffel, S. Risi, R. Doursat, & H. Lipson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, (pp. 400‒407). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cultural Tolerance, Innovation Diffusion, & Collective Adaptation

This research aims to unravel the micro-mechanisms that underpin the macro-level correlations between cultural tolerance and collective innovation. Our study centers on the micro-mechanisms of indirect minority influence among workers with diverse domain expertise. We posit that influence stemming from minorities who have different domain expertise in workers’ collaboration networks can be a pivotal driver for organizational innovation in changing market environments, and cultural tolerance is critical for such minority-induced social innovation.

Our systematic simulation experiment identified the sweet spot of tolerance and consistency that produced robustly faster adaptation speed in response to abrupt market shifts. Organizational culture characterized by a medium level of tolerance (t = 0.6) and a small consistency (κ = 0.05) facilitated rapid adaptation to new market needs. It should be emphasized that this level of tolerance corresponds to interacting in a balanced way with people with similar domain expertise and those with differing domain expertise, with slightly more interaction outside of one’s group than within it. This finding provides evidence that indirect minority influence can be a micro-mechanism underlying the link between cultural tolerance and innovation. Intriguingly, our simulation experiment also revealed that a decrease in tolerance from 0.6 to 0 necessitates an increase in the level of consistency (from 0.05 to 1) to optimize the adaptation speed. This implies that organizations with a tight culture might need to go further and increase cross-domain consistency – in other words, further tighten across domains – to ensure faster adaptation in the face of market shifts.

This study explains the conflicting evidences on the relation between cultural tightness and/or looseness and innovation. Our finding explains how cultural looseness is generally associated with innovation in cross-cultural data (Deckert and Shomaker, 2022) as well as data within loose culture (Jackson et al., 2019). Our finding also explains Chua et al.’s (2019) seemingly contrary evidence that across 31 provinces in China, provinces with tight cultures exhibit higher rates of incremental innovation. Also, high cross-domain consistency prevents the emergence of radically innovative domains, which explains why provinces with tight cultures exhibit lower rates of radical innovation in the same paper.

Publications

Jung, J., & Gulden, T. R. (2025). From Inclusion to Innovation: Using an agent-based simulation to unravel the micro-mechanisms of the macro-level tolerance-innovation link. International journal of organization theory and behavior. doi:10.1108/ijotb-09-2023-0189 [PsyArXiv Preprint]
Jung, J. (2025). Social Innovation Model. CoMSES Computational Model Library. Retrieved from: https://www.comses.net/codebases/fa31eedd-d99f-4469-8d38-457020d95266/releases/1.0.0/

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