A Model of Minority Influence in Preferential Norm Formation

Minority influence takes place when a minority group influences the majority group, which has been widely studied in psychology and sociology. Most existing works are, however, qualitative studies or based on field experiments; large-scale quantitative experiments are hard to conduct due to the lack of a model. Thus, we propose a new agentbased framework, Minority Influence Model, for modelling the interactions among individuals to explore minority influence in the context of norm emergence. What makes the model novel is that it is an integration of three key aspects. First, the model considers multiple player interactions; second, the actions of agents are driven by a combination of endogenous preference and exogenous social surrounding; third, the decision-making strategy for each agent is based on the evolution of gist. With Minority Influence Model, considerable experiments have been performed. The experimental results suggest that the size of the minority group, the extent to which the agents of the minority group prefer an action to the other, and the degree of disagreement between the majority and the minority can be the three main factors of minority influence. We also found some tipping points under some specific scenarios.