Concept
Minority Rule
decision-making product-design
An idea Rory Sutherland attributes to Nassim Taleb (originally from a French physicist): because of an asymmetry in tolerance, the preferences of an intransigent minority can end up dictating outcomes for an entire group even though the minority never actually holds majority support. Sutherland's example: if a handful of children in a school are Muslim, the whole school kitchen often goes halal — because non-Muslim children are happy eating halal food, but Muslim children aren't willing to eat non-halal food, so the easiest way to accommodate everyone is to satisfy the stricter constraint. He extends the same logic to why pizza is broadly popular: not because everyone loves it, but because almost nobody actively hates it, unlike more polarizing foods.
Applied to product design, Sutherland passed the idea to a colleague at Ogilvy Sydney, who applied it to KFC Australia's "build your own bucket" feature — designed not to produce a statistically optimal bucket of chicken pieces, but to let each family exclude whichever pieces one or two members disliked (see KFC Build-Your-Own-Bucket Minority Rule Case).
Discussed in
- Episode 63 — 63- Rory Sutherland - Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
- Episode 64 — 64- Welcome to the Rory Sutherland Nudge Clinic