Fig. 4.

Norm abandonment as a function of the tipping threshold. The tipping threshold is a critical determinant of the likelihood to observe change. Each marker represents the percentage of subjects in the last five periods that abandoned Blue in a given experimental society. Also shown is the theoretically predicted frequency of norm abandonment (solid line) and 99% CI (shaded area) from 10,000 simulated trials per tipping threshold based on the estimated parameters $\mu$ = 1.73 and $\sigma =1.91$ (Probit model with society random effects), see SI Appendix, section 3. The theoretical predictions correctly anticipate norm persistence or norm abandonment in 23 of the 24 societies (i.e., in 96% of instances). The model provides a similarly good fit when using a subset of the conditions to estimate μ and σ and use them to perform out-of-sample predictions (SI Appendix, Fig. S5).