English

The first shall be last: selection-driven minority becomes majority

Physics and Society 2014-05-14 v1 Statistical Mechanics Social and Information Networks Populations and Evolution

Abstract

Street demonstrations occur across the world. In Rio de Janeiro, June/July 2013, they reach beyond one million people. A wrathful reader of \textit{O Globo}, leading newspaper in the same city, published a letter \cite{OGlobo} where many social questions are stated and answered Yes or No. These million people of street demonstrations share opinion consensus about a similar set of social issues. But they did not reach this consensus within such a huge numbered meetings. Earlier, they have met in diverse small groups where some of them could be convinced to change mind by other few fellows. Suddenly, a macroscopic consensus emerges. Many other big manifestations are widespread all over the world in recent times, and are supposed to remain in the future. The interesting questions are: 1) How a binary-option opinion distributed among some population evolves in time, through local changes occurred within small-group meetings? and 2) Is there some natural selection rule acting upon? Here, we address these questions through an agent-based model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.6993,
  title  = {The first shall be last: selection-driven minority becomes majority},
  author = {Nuno Crokidakis and Paulo Murilo Castro de Oliveira},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.6993},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Physica A

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:00:27.880Z