Will General Mattis end up being Citizen B, whose willingness to speak out proves explosively contagious? 
In a recent thread about behavioral contagion’s role in debate, I described an example involving 10 citizens—A through J—who would oppose an authoritarian regime publicly if they thought it safe to do so. Citizen B was the pivotal figure in this example.
Each has a threshold indicating her/his willingness to speak out as a function of how many others are speaking out. A, for example, is willing to speak out no matter what. B and C are more cautious, each willing to speak out only if at least 20% of others are also speaking out.
Others have still higher thresholds, as summarized in the table below. Citizen A, by assumption, will speak out irrespective of what others do. But A constitutes only 10 percent of the population, and that’s below the threshold of each of the others.
All but A will therefore remain silent. The stable outcome in this situation, indicated by the asterisk above the shaded entries in the table, is that only one in 10 citizens speak out. The regime survives. But now suppose something makes B less cautious.
Perhaps because he is offended by a leader’s actions, B’s threshold for speaking out falls from 20% to only 10%. Since A is already protesting, B’s slightly lower new threshold is now met, so he too speaks out, in the process raising the percentage of citizens speaking out to 20.
This makes C willing to speak out, pushing the percentage to 30. E then speaks out, raising the percentage to 40, and so on. A small change affecting only B thus quickly causes the percentage speaking out to rise from 10 to 100. This time, the regime topples.
Evidence suggests that General Mattis’s statement may be encouraging others to speak out. In its wake, for example, several prominent military leaders have released statements of their own sharply critical of the Lafayette Park incident.
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A more telling indication will be the willingness of members of the Republican Senate majority to stand up to the president. And here, too, we see glimmers of movement. Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski released a statement today that read in part:
Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley, long a champion of Congressional oversight, had remained silent in the face of Trump’s recent firing of several inspectors general. But in the wake of Mattis’s statement, he too has begun to stir:
But it’s of course too soon to know whether the Mattis statement will be pivotal. Behavioral contagion helps explain not only why change is so hard to predict, but also why, when it happens, it can occur so precipitously.
