How a committed minority can change society

Over the last year, handshakes have been replaced by fist or elbow bumps as a greeting. Its the pandemic effect and it shows that age-old social conventions can not only change, but do so suddenly. 

But how does this happen? How do social conventions change? 

Robotic engineers and marketing scientists joined forces to study this phenomenon, combining online experiments and statistical analysis into a mathematical model that shows how a committed minority can influence the majority to overturn long-standing practices.

This is studied in many ways mostly is relying on lots of data from observations and experiments. Ming Cao, Professor of Networks and Robotics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen, has studied complex group behaviour in robots by using agent-based simulations, among other methods. These agents follow a limited number of simple rules, often inspired by nature, which can lead to realistic complex behaviour. 'Swarming birds or schools of fish are a good example', Cao explains, 'their movements can be reproduced by agents that follow a few simple rules on keeping a certain distance and heading in the same direction as their neighbours.'