A small, inflexible minority can sometimes shape the choices available to everyone else. Nassim Taleb calls this the dictatorship of the intolerant minority.
This caught my attention because we often assume shared choices reflect what the majority wants.
Taleb describes the minority rule in Skin in the game: a small group of people with firm preferences and skin in the game can influence wider social norms.
Some examples:
- When one person in a family of five is lactose intolerant, and the other four aren't, odds are all of them eat dairy free meals.
- If nine people in a German business meeting speak both German and English, while one speaks only English, the meeting will probably be held in English.
- If four of 20 party guests drink only wine and everyone else is happy with either wine or beer, the host may serve only wine.
The pattern repeats when one group has a firm requirement and the rest are flexible.
https://twitter.com/gijsheerkens/status/1342083827288731649
The tweet above shows how the same pattern can spread across levels, a process Taleb calls renormalization.
Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one of the four boxes will contain four boxes, all the way down, and all the way up until the next level. Yellow is the majority, pink the minority.
Consider what might happen at the German company:
- When those 10 persons communicate their meeting results to another department, odds are it will be in English.
- When all departments get together for a company barbecue, odds are everyone will speak in English.
- When any employee of the company communicates with a client, odds are it will be in English.
- That's already three levels (meeting, departments, company, clients). Remember that this all started because a single person didn't speak German.
This is also how things that don't make sense if you think about it properly, like veganism (actually worse for health, worse for the planet), feminism (actually worse for women, worse for society) are being imposed to everyone by a small number of people.
Many people have no strong preference, or not a strong enough one to ask for a change. The inflexible minority knows this, hence always gets what it wants.
I also think virtue signaling can play a part: people like to be seen doing the right thing.
Social norms do not always emerge from a vote. Sometimes a small group has a disproportionate effect.