When you meet somebody coming out of Syria for the first time, you start to hear the same sentences that everything is OK.

It'll take like six months upto one year to become a normal human being.

For him to say what he thinks, what he feels then he might start whispering.

He won't speak loudly.

Much of what I have to say is captured in that passage.

I'm going to tell you, Ah, tale that relates to my larger themes.

That isn't a quotation, but that's research from Saudi Arabia.

The background is that, by custom in Saudi Arabia, women aren't in the labor force unless their husbands say it's okay.

In the research, it was found that young Saudi men believe overwhelmingly, that it's completely fine if their wives air working.

That is their private judgment.

At the same time, young Saudi men believe that other young Saudi men think it's not at all fine.

Their private judgment departs from their assessment of what the social enormous in the experiment, Saudi men young men were told.

Actually, most people like you think it's completely fine.

When young Saudi men were informed of what other young Saudi men actually think, they started saying publicly, including to their spouses.

Please go work and job applications skyrocketed.

The Saudi research and the Syrian quotation are the same.

Their stories of social change coming either in a hurry or slowly as a result of an unleashing of private judgment unleashing which comes from the softening of social norms.

I want toe stress, the unexpected, often shocking nature of successful social movements.

No one sees them coming.

Lenin was stunned by the success and speed of the Russian revolution.

Now pause over that Lenin, an architect of the Russian Revolution, had no idea that it would work.

Toqueville, the greatest authority on the French Revolution, tells us nobody saw the French Revolution before it happened.

More recently, the Iranian revolution of 1979 was wholly unanticipated.

The participants had no idea it could work more recently.

Still, the Arab spring was anticipated by the best analysts in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the best analysts in the United Kingdom and the United States air really good.

They had no idea the Arab spring was about to come.

It's puzzling but true that large movements, including some that were in the midst of and revolutions seemed to come in waves.

They spread within countries and from one country to another for reasons that remain mysterious.

It's characteristic of modern social science to speak of contagion effects, but I wonder if that isn't a metaphor rather than an explanation.

It's not literally contagious.

It's not like the flu.

It's contagious in some metaphorical sense.

So what does it even mean to say that a social movement is contagious?

I'm going to try to approach these questions.

Okay, I four moving parts in this approach, the first is preference falsification, by which people often do not say what they're in herself is crying out.

That's the story from Syria.

The second moving part is diverse thresholds.

The third is interdependencies, which is not about sentiment and Christmas, but instead about how what we do and think is a product of what other people say and do and think.

And the fourth and final moving part is group polarization, which helps explain how like minded people go to extremes with respect to preference falsification.

Most of us have a bunch of thoughts inside our heads with respect to our workplace, our town, our family, our country, that we tell nobody about some of those inner thoughts we might be ambivalent about and think they're probably wrong.

Some of them carry clear conviction, but as in the case of the Syrian computer programmer at most, we will whisper them.

We falsify in the public domain what we think privately.

Second point is that different thresholds for action mean that for some of US injustice and were there, if we see something awful, we will say something or do something instantly.

Others have high thresholds.

They have to be really roused with respect to interdependencies.

The suggestion is that most of us are reactive to what other people say and do.

If one person is doing something calling for social change, extra wires e.

We might think crazy person.

If 1000 people are we might think, Why didn't I join them yesterday?

Many movements are not on Li about the revelation of suppressed preferences, experience, beliefs and values.

They're also about the transformation of all of those things.

So what we observe, in addition to unleashing, is altering pre existing beliefs.

Any social movement casts a new light on past experiences and tells it to new narrative about, UM, it doesn't merely illicit pre existing judgment.

It produces novel ones.

Part of the move.

Success of social movements that accomplish what they aim.

Teoh is to turn a sense of embarrassment and shame into a sense of dignity.