The “magic third” rule: How just one voice can transform a group

For a long time, only men sat on corporate boards — those “top of the ladder” advisory bodies that are often highly paid and never seem happier than when in the middle of a three-hour meeting. Strangely, there are often around nine or ten people on these boards. And, for a long time, they were all-male affairs.

Then, slowly, women started to join. And there’s evidence to suggest that women tend to do things differently — they talk differently, they listen differently, and they ask different questions. But one woman in a sea of men is isolated and often ignored. There is no “woman effect” in the culture or dynamic of the board. If there are two women, things may change a bit, but it’s much the same — they might still be talked over or sidelined. But something magical happens when you hit that three out of nine mark — that third. Suddenly, a shift happens. Now, the “woman effect” is felt, and the women in the room take on influence.

This is an example of what Malcolm Gladwell calls the “magic third” in his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point.

The magic third

Scientists, sociologists, and data analysts are often a bit dubious about exact numbers. You can rarely say, “Half of people are like this,” or “76% of the time, this happens.” Science is often a rough, best-fit Bayesian kind of thing. But as Gladwell told Big Think, “Even the researchers, like Damon Centola, who studied this were stunned by their results. They could observe it empirically, but it still felt mysterious.”

This stunning result was known as the magic third — “the idea that when outsiders in a group reach a certain threshold, about a third, the whole group shifts.” This might be a small thing, as when a group is deciding which restaurant to eat at. Or it could be a big thing, as when a certain demographic group moves into a residential area (an example Gladwell explores in his book).

In speaking with Big Think, Gladwell explained that he used the term “magic” third not, of course, because of sorcery, but because the magic third rule “describes cases where our explanatory tools are insufficient, where things seem a little magical — not supernatural, but mysterious. I’ve always believed, particularly in this book, that there are far more phenomena that are “magical” in this sense than we realize. We often assume there’s a clear explanation for extraordinary events, but many times, there isn’t.”

Human psychology is always a hard science to do well. The data is difficult to collect, and conducting randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind experiments is challenging. But when it comes to widespread social psychology like this, we are left to Gladwell to artfully explain and explore the strange phenomena at play. And one of those is that it takes roughly a third of a group to change the culture or direction of the whole.

Cancel culture and witch-hunts

One of the areas that social scientists often study, but which Gladwell doesn’t touch on in his newest book, is cancel culture — those short, intense, and almost hysterical bouts of shouting someone down for holding a certain belief or doing a certain thing. Big Think asked Gladwell about how his magic third rule applies here.

“Well, witch hunts, like McCarthyism, are examples of these short-lived but intense phenomena. They feel like a fever that sweeps through society and then disappears just as quickly. Regardless of whether you agree with the aims, the one thing people get wrong is their duration — they’re often temporary.”

Something like a magic third rule might apply here: When a third of a group decides something is offensive or despicable, the whole jumps on and agrees. So, if a third of people believe that communism is evil and communists are traitors, that idea spreads — like a fever. But a fever passes quicker than it feels at the time.

The other factor at play here is a second concept Gladwell explores or revises in his new book — the idea of the “super-spreaders.” Gladwell is fond of medical metaphors, and his analogies from biological viruses and “ideas” are well made. When the COVID-19 pandemic spread, a small body of data sprung up to suggest that a relatively few individuals — the super-spreaders — were responsible for hundreds and even thousands of infections in a certain community. As Gladwell told us, “With COVID and the super-spreader in Boston, it’s shocking to think that hundreds of thousands of people could trace back to one individual.”

With cancel culture and an idea’s virality, things are much the same. Certain people act as “lightning rods” in that they attract or rally a certain portion of society to have a disproportionate effect on the whole. For example, J.K. Rowling has become an example of such a lightning rod, and one reason for this is “because we think we know them. We’re deeply invested in personalizing our relationship to art, which is why their statements can seem so powerful.”

Comforting and terrifying

These ideas are arguably both comforting and terrifying. On the one hand, they invest the individual with more power than we might suppose. The third woman to walk into a boardroom isn’t just one more person; she’s the tipping point. Likewise, in a pub quiz, office meeting, or family get-together, your voice might be the voice that sets everyone on a different course.

It’s terrifying, though, because it seems to show just how suspectable we are to the mysterious power of group dynamics. We are victims of both the movement of the magic third and the tidal impact of intense phenomena like cancel culture.

In his interview with Big Think, Gladwell finished by discussing an idea that might lie somewhere between the two: the role and power of community.

“The thing I’m most fascinated by,” Gladwell said, “is how our communities influence us in ways we don’t even realize. I don’t mean the country you live in, but more specifically, the smaller communities — the local area. It’s so easy to attribute everything to personal connections, like your family or close friends, but there’s so much more at play [And] I argue in the book that we should be looking more closely at the communities we’re part of and how they shape us unconsciously.”

Communities — local, small, neighborhood communities — are the middle ground. We can have our say and feel our opinion has an effect, yet we can also enjoy the sway and movement of the group. There’s a point where you can be the tipping point and the point that tips — and that’s in our communities.