5 - Peripheral Influence: Experimentations in Collective Risk Taking

Summary

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

Salvador Dalí

In the aftermath of the Petrograd rebellion of February 1917, Trotsky wondered about the leaders of the February insurrections: who led the revolution? Who raised the workers to their feet? Who brought soldiers into the streets? After quickly repudiating the idea of a “spontaneous” revolution, he fittingly moved on to ascribe the success of the rebellion to the teachings of the party of Lenin. In this chapter, I examine the same puzzle of spontaneous, seemingly leaderless revolutions. I show that in a series of experiments on collective risk taking, the peripheral vanguard trigger cascades of collective action – or apathy – that are more frequent, and conditioned upon occurrence, faster in their convergence to total action or apathy. The same network experiments with the risk-taking vanguard at central positions of the experimental network yield fewer cascades of risk taking and apathy, and whenever they happen, they take longer to encompass an absolute majority of the social network. The results of these behavioral experiments on network collective action provide a resolution for the paradox of leaderless and spontaneous revolution. Those who lead are not the leaders.

In the synchronous network experiments of collective risk taking I detail in this chapter, the subjects are ranked based on an individual risk propensity measure, the most risk seeking are placed in the most central, the most peripheral and random network locations and the subjects repeatedly enact a collective lottery which rewards global risk taking if the majority takes action, and penalizes taking risk if the attempt at mobilization fails.

The results of the experiments emphasize the significance of revolutionary vanguards’ distribution across the underlying social network. The radicals’ arraignment is shaped by spatial and social confines alike. Clearly the distribution of the revolutionary vanguard in the geographical expanse of Petrograd in February 1917, or Paris in the summer of 1789, is unavailable, but the same is not true for Cairo in 2011. All these historical events constituted spontaneous uprisings dispersed across major cities subsuming civilians and armed forces alike. For the Egyptian case, in Chapter (2) I showed that the spatial dispersion of the revolutionary vanguard, defined as those who protested at the beginning of the unrest, was higher than the ordinary protester.