How the Average Inmate Can Be More Influential than Oprah

I am buck naked, bending over and spreading my butt cheeks on the command of a stranger. It is one of the many indignities inmates go through in jail that create — perhaps initially — a feeling of complete powerlessness. It might be surprising to hear, then, that there are scientifically proven ways that the average inmate can be more influential in changing the world than a celebrity like Oprah.

The first reason is a concept, outlined by sociologist Damon Centola in his recent book Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, called “countervailing influence.” Highly connected people like Oprah might seem like thought leaders, given the number of people paying attention to what they do and say. But careful examination of the data shows that, when it comes to change, their connections can become a trap. Oprah needs to perform to her audience’s expectations, and any deviation from that will be punished. 

This is why highly connected people are rarely at the forefront of change. From the explosion of Twitter in the late 2000s to the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter or the Arab Spring, “influencers” like Oprah played very minor roles. Instead, it was a large number of ordinary people, often at the periphery of society, who caused these technologies and ideas to explode. They faced less status risk in adopting change. And it was only when a critical mass of these ordinary people was reached that “influencers” like Oprah jumped on the bandwagon — in the case of Oprah’s first tweet, in April 2009 (after which, growth in Twitter actually slowed).

I’ve seen the impact of “countervailing influence” and “status risk” firsthand in 20+ years of activism on many issues. It’s almost canonical, for example, that students and faculty at elite schools are much less open to “marginal” causes like animal rights. I remember being stunned when I leafletted at a community college in Chicago for the first time around 2005. People were taking my leaflets and actually having conversations. It was not until I read research like Centola’s that I understood why: the go-getters at places like MIT and the University of Chicago were trapped by the reputational demands of social success.

The second reason Oprah’s impact is overstated is the lack of “social redundancy” in her followers. They are all connected to Oprah, but not connected to each other. This limits Oprah’s impact, even if she were able to adopt and push change. Each person influenced by her is influenced alone; there are no further connections to the network of Oprah followers beyond Oprah herself.

This is fatal whenever change requires some cost or sacrifice. It turns out people are unwilling to make such changes unless a critical mass of people around them is also changing — even if the change obviously makes sense. Economist Lori Beamon found that farmers in Malawi were 200% more likely to adopt improved agricultural practices if someone in their local social network also changed. That sort of clustering of change can quickly build momentum for a movement.

Oprah and other influencers (including, in much smaller fashion, me) have no ability to create these local clusters of change. Our model is too “hub and spoke” — lots of relatively weak connections to each other. In contrast, you have access to your local social network in a way that Oprah (and I) do not. When you convince two friends to go vegan, for example, it’s much more likely that those two friends will know — and socially reinforce — each other.

Oddly, jail is a perfect distillation of the two effects I describe in this blog: first, countervailing influence and status risk; and second, local cluster. Inmates are on the periphery of society and have nothing to lose in doing things that might seem deviant. And we are forced to cluster in a hyper-local way, with a few hundred inmates compelled to live together in a single cell block.

I would still rather Oprah go vegan than the average inmate in a cell. For one, inmates have virtually no ability to reach the broader world, even if we do change! But that question is a closer call than most people think.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is about the power of each of us to create change.

If you are inspired by Wayne’s story, share it with your friends and family. Make a social media post about the trial. Encourage your loved ones to share a vegan meal with you. Invite them to volunteer on a political campaign for animals — like Direct Action Everywhere’s ballot initiative to ban factory farms, the very ones Wayne is in jail for fighting, in Sonoma County.

The ability of open rescue to transform the world for animals is within all of us. The science of social networks shows us how.