By Joe Corcoran
In policy and communications, inflexible minorities trump flexible majorities. When they don’t like something that the majority can live without, it will disappear before long. When they demand something that the majority has no need for, you will see more of it than their numbers could possibly justify on paper.
This is known as the rule of minority influence and it’s not necessarily something to be lamented. When populations make big decisions, competing values are inevitably negotiated. As Thomas Schelling famously argued, in any negotiation, inflexibility is the key to a favourable settlement.
Examples of the rule abound in daily life. Approximately 1% of the world’s population suffer from peanut allergies yet most schools ban all products with traces of peanuts in them. This is because those who enjoy peanuts can always do without them, while those with the allergies are not in a position to simply live and let live.
At a less obvious level, virtually every motorway service station in the world has a McDonald’s in it, because although most drivers, most of the time would probably prefer to dine in a finer quality restaurant, they’ll always have a McDonald’s when pressed, whereas some drivers may decline to eat in a place they’re not familiar with.
We’re still only skimming the surface here, though. The rule has been used to explain everything from the emergence of extremist political parties to the occurence of radical market fluctuations. Indeed, so ubiquitous is it, that it might be more useful to understand the conditions under which it doesn’t hold.
Two factors are important here. Firstly, the spatial distribution of the minority throughout the population must be relatively even. If the minority is concentrated in a specific place, it cannot exact influence in the normal manner. The approximate threshold is an even spread of around 3.5% of the population.
Secondly, the higher the cost imposed on the majority, the less flexible it is likely to be. Peanuts may be dispensable enough but when one school in the UK tries to ban fruit, it makes national headlines. Even in scenarios like these, however, pushback virtually always comes from another inflexible minority who feel the cost most acutely.
The power of inflexible minorities is often overlooked by communications specialists. Companies which produce GMOs, for example, have spent vast sums of money trying to convince a majority of people that their products do not bear the risks sometimes associated with them. The problem is, all the people they’ve convinced are just as willing to go with non-GMOs, while an inflexible minority remains that will not touch GMO products.
The supermarket owner, looking to cater to both groups, could theoretically separate GMO products from non-GMO products, providing a dedicated aisle in his or her shop for the latter, but that requires a lot of costly oversight. Instead, recognising that they lose little by doing so, they decide to forgo GMO products entirely and save themselves the trouble. The majority’s favourable views end up being irrelevant and a lot of money has been needlessly misspent.
To avoid this kind of mistake, all business strategists, campaigners and communicators ought to ask themselves two questions, before starting a new project.
- Is there a minority obstacle in play? That is, even if I can get the majority of people on my side, could an inflexible minority plausibly affect the cost structure of the situation powerfully enough to bring everyone along with them?
- Is there a minority coalition that can help me? Finding this coalition is a necessity if the answer to (1) is yes. However, even in an opposition-free landscape, working with such a coalition will often be more cost effective than trying to win over the majority.
It’s one thing to ask these questions and another to act on them. Strong minority networks often take time and effort to cultivate. However, if working smart means getting more out than you put in, then the smartest campaigners will always respect the outsized power of minority influence. They know that doing so may be the difference between success and failure.
