Social Change

June 2025

• Jun 27, 2025ExplainersHow Culture Evolves Over TimeCulture changes through four transmission channels (vertical, horizontal, oblique and reverse) and selection biases favoring prestige, conformity and emotionally memorable content. Ronald Inglehart's World Values Survey, covering over 100 countries across seven waves by 2022, found values shift from survival to self-expression largely through cohort replacement rather than individuals changing their minds.39 MIN41.0k

May 2025

• May 22, 2025CultureUnderstanding Moral Progress and Its ChallengesKwame Anthony Appiah examined three moral revolutions and found a common mechanism in The Honor Code: the practices were abandoned because carrying on came to be associated with shame rather than honor, with the shift in what counted as respectable preceding the change. This page weighs that against the measurement problem, the contingency objection and new atrocities, and notes that Pinker's decline-of-violence case is disputed by Gray and Moyn.26 MIN26.9k

April 2025

• Apr 24, 2025CultureNorm Drift ExplainedDamon Centola's experiments, published in Science in 2018, found that a minority norm typically collapses below roughly 25 percent adoption in a network and spreads rapidly above it. Timur Kuran's preference falsification model explains why norms held together by public conformity can look stable for decades and then cascade, as communist regimes in Eastern Europe did in 1989. Generational turnover and tolerated small violations each drive drift, in no fixed direction.37 MIN21.0k

December 2024

• Dec 24, 2024ConceptsMinority Influence: How Small Groups Shift MajoritiesMoscovici's point was not the size of the shift but that it happened at all on unambiguous colors, and that an inconsistent minority had essentially no effect. Maass and Clark later found the influence runs underground, with majorities moving public answers while minorities move private ones. Nemeth added that exposure to dissent improves thinking even when the dissenter is wrong, because it widens the search for alternatives.19 MIN4.8k