Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

This is the BBC

Did this interview with Tim Marlow - BBC arts and culture guru - last week for tonight's Culture Shock on the World Service.

Go listen (think they store it for a week).

Hurrah for Reithian values...

Humans and apes have no predators...

...apart from their peers. That's why their experience of stress is interesting (compared to other primates and similar).

That's right: it's other people that create stress for us.

Hat tip to Mark who pointed up Jaime's post on this.

Runaround RIP

Sad news: Mike Reid (better known as Frank Butcher in the BBC's Eastenders soap) has ambled off to the genial-gameshow-host-greenroom in the sky.

For non-Brits (or those under a certain age), Runaround was a 70s kids tv show which harnessed (or rather acknowledged and sought to frustrate) Herd instincts. And thus IMHO the peak of Reid's career

Go here for more on the show.

And just once today, shout Mike's catchphase outloud: "RUNAROUND"

Microrituals of sociability and the modern street

...argh!

Sounds like at terrible PhD thesis, doesn't it?

But it's actually a terrific piece by Joe Moran based on the HERD insight that our super social nature still powers much of our lives (but is hidden by the "I" culture artefacts we've surrounded ourselves with...)

He also wrote this - equally - terrific book which monitors the shifting reality of daily life for us little Britains

Can I just say....?

...how much I love this little film...Gods own music.

Help required

Am doing a session at the AAAA planning conference in San Diego shortly with the suitably provacative title "In praise of stupid: why account planning need to become less clever".

Have a number of ideas and material already (From the history of the 'magical quadrant graph' and our love of the top right box, the unimportance of psychology in explaining behaviour, and the new requirments of changing environment eg. my/Zeus Jones's obsession with changing behaviour by inventing new behaviour) to make it an interesting session for me (and the audience) but I just wondered if any folk out there had other suggestions.

Apart from anything else, it seems wrong for me to talk as if my superior intellect (ahem..) was the thing that mattered...should we do stuff together?

What do you think?

All suggestions credited properly, honest...

Bigger boys made me eat it...?

Rory and the NYT both on the money today: spotting a humdinger of a science piece (originally in the New England Journal of Medicine).

"Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too"

,
intones the NYT in a surprised manner.

And how does this happen?

“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,”

No s***, Dr Christakis. We do what we do because of other people? Surely not.

Keep up at the back, please

PS the one saving grace of the piece is that it while it talks about social networks it doesn't fall into the trap of Tipping Point influencers: it's just those you're surrounded by that influence an individuals perceptions, behaviour and consumption....

Monkey (Wo)man?

Hat tip to Newy: Amy does her impersonation of Marky Mark (shorely not?). Or here with Jules

For more monkey fun go here (hat tip Sair)

Walmart and Social media

Matt Creamer at Adage has a good piece on the how the Empire is taking the plunge.

Perhaps they've been reading Josh's blog
?

Meet the author...

Here's an innovation that my publishers have suggested: videos of authors talking about the ideas behind their books.

At the moment it's only here but in a short while it'll be on Amazon, too

All very Harry Potter-ish, doncha think? Instead of just look inside, you'll have a short pitch from authors. Like paintings that talk...

"What's that on your head....?

...a WIG!"

Lots of laughs last night at Lovebox with the fab B52s (creators of one of the silliest songs ever - see headline). Truly the greatest party band in the world

Mucho enthusiasmos from the crowd, half of whom weren't born when the Jetsons riff of Planet Claire (with cheesy Farfisa topping) first hit the world and none of whom could have seen the band for 15 years or more.

Rather odd interlude afterwards having a drink with band backstage. All lovely and friendly but I felt (as I often do in these circs) like Prince Charles ("so how long has one been a popular musician...").

Top night though

Potter mania, Sainsbury's and Danny the Dealer

(pls someone tell me how to make sure these phone-photies don't rotate like this...)

Today in Sainsbury's Camden.

Middle aged female staff member dressed as Harry Potter, pressing shoppers to buy their copy of JK's latest...

Makes me think:

1. when 360 really DOESN"T work (when it just looks silly)
2. how you know something's really over when it's in Sainsbury's (Danny the dealer in Withnail says, "the greatest era in the history of mankind is over...they're selling hipping wigs in Woolworths")
3. that greed is not a good look

Ouch

The big opportunity for Social Media

While the WSJ is documenting the latest dunderhead effort by the marketing industry to exploit the Social Media Revolution for its own short term gains, RobPatrob reminds us that the opportunity that the Social Media Revolution presents us with is a whole lot more interesting and the problems it might help us solve a whole lot more important.

"It seems that our institutions have turned inward and now serve only themselves.

There are great ideas out there that have the power to turn all of this around. We know that a local local direct food system will renew our food system. We know that if we put our resources behind parents of young kids that most of our learning, behavior and health problems would diminish, we know that if we invested in renewables and networks what we use to subsidize coal and oil that we could approach energy independence. We know that a military that saw its role in cultural terms could act with authority in a troubled world for a fraction of the cost.

The issue is not ideas. Every field has more than 20 years of great thinking ready to make a difference. The issue is power.

Like the Catholic Church in the 15th century, the institutions have the power to keep the ideas contained, the innovators cowed, co opted or crushed. The cost of our political system means that our representatives are owned by the interests that only serve themselves...

...The greatest paradox of all is that a new technology has the power to take us home away from machine relationships to being more human and more aligned to nature. So what Social Media is all about is remembering how to be human again".

I like the idea of a new Reformation - cutting out the middle man from our (naturally) Social Selves. Now there's something to Twitter about...

Berlin - a taster

Hosted this podcast for Esomar recently with 4 other speakers at the Berlin shindig. Think it ended up being a great little conversation and gives some sense of just how innovative researchers are being nowadays (and how exciting that is, certainly compared to the rather lumpen innovation lite that is creative agency or media agency land - honorable exceptions of course).

Thanks as ever to Surinder for a top production job.

Schelling and the Wall of Gum

Tom Woodnut pointed me to this very physical illustration of Herd behaviour. On the wall of a nearby office folk seem to have taken to sticking their gum on the brickwork (see pic). Clearly one individual started this but others started to copy the behaviour they saw in front of them (maybe during smoke-breaks - ah, how I miss them...).

This is the point outlined in a much more articulate manner by Schelling in his classic book. Most of our lives consist of responding to a context which consists of other people responses to a context which consists of other peoples responses etc...

Put more simply, we do what we do mostly as a response to what we see others around us doing.

Advice to a 12 year old

Just spent glorious day fishing with my 12 year old nephew, James. This thought occured: two together is fine, but a gang is best. Particularly for teenage boys - whatever your mum and Ol Man Krupke tell you. "Join a gang, any gang" said the late Kurt Vonnegut.

While you and I might find a gang of adolescents disturbing or frightening (and they might enjoy engendering that response in us), the truth is that they are merely doing what all humans do: gather together for safety, reassurance and cooperation.

Hat tip to Charles for spotting Vonnegut's version of this idea in a late interview...

Look what we done, Ma

Gavin and Drew had an idea.

Could the bloggersphere produce a book that was worth reading?

So they post a request themselves for as many of us as possible to write a chapter on Conversation for a charity book. 100 or so good folk said yes. Me, Richard, Faris & Gareth included.

As of today, July 16th, you can buy it here (as an e-book, paperback or hardback) BUT only here

5 reasons you should buy one today:

1. It's for a very good cause (Variety, the children's charity).

2. None of us makes a penny from it. We just thought it'd be interesting to participate and that kind of motivation often leads to the most interesting stuff

3. Given the subject, it's bound to be an interesting read (and given the format of lots of little 400 word essays, if you don't like one you can just move on OR you could use it as a day book - one little thought each day...)

4. It's in the news and you know how fashionable you like to be

5. Because all these people think you should... Even if you don't recognise many of the contributers' names, you know (or you wouldn't be on this blog) that you can't resist that ol' Herd effect!

Here's the full list of contributers:

Gavin Heaton
Drew McLellan
CK
Valeria Maltoni
Emily Reed
Katie Chatfield
Greg Verdino
Mack Collier
Lewis Green
Sacrum
Ann Handley
Mike Sansone
Paul McEnany
Roger von Oech
Anna Farmery
David Armano
Bob Glaza
Mark Goren
Matt Dickman
Scott Monty
Richard Huntington
Cam Beck
David Reich
Luc Debaisieux
Sean Howard
Tim Jackson
Patrick Schaber
Roberta Rosenberg
Uwe Hook
Tony D. Clark
Todd Andrlik
Toby Bloomberg
Steve Woodruff
Steve Bannister
Steve Roesler
Stanley Johnson
Spike Jones
Nathan Snell
Simon Payn
Ryan Rasmussen
Ron Shevlin
Roger Anderson
Robert Hruzek
Rishi Desai
Phil Gerbyshak
Peter Corbett
Pete Deutschman
Nick Rice
Nick Wright
Michael Morton
Mark Earls
Mark Blair
Mario Vellandi
Lori Magno
Kristin Gorski
Kris Hoet
G.Kofi Annan
Kimberly Dawn Wells
Karl Long
Julie Fleischer
Jordan Behan
John La Grou
Joe Raasch
Jim Kukral
Jessica Hagy
Janet Green
Jamey Shiels
Dr. Graham Hill
Gia Facchini
Geert Desager
Gaurav Mishra
Gary Schoeniger
Gareth Kay
Faris Yakob
Emily Clasper
Ed Cotton
Dustin Jacobsen
Tom Clifford
David Polinchock
David Koopmans
David Brazeal
David Berkowitz
Carolyn Manning
Craig Wilson
Cord Silverstein
Connie Reece
Colin McKay
Chris Newlan
Chris Corrigan
Cedric Giorgi
Brian Reich
Becky Carroll
Arun Rajagopal
Andy Nulman
Amy Jussel
AJ James
Kim Klaver
Sandy Renshaw
Susan Bird
Ryan Barrett
Troy Worman
S. Neil Vineberg

Go on, go here and buy a copy now

Big things, big causes?

Good piece in this week's New Scientist by Patrick Leman on "Major event - major cause" reasoning (how we seem to be programmed to intuit major causes for events which have widespread and major effects on the world) and our contemporary love of conspiracy theories...

"I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent"

Leman explains why this would seem to be important to us:

"To appreciate why this form of reasoning is seductive consider the alternative: major events having minor or mundane causes - for example, the assassinationf of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortabl: we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability"

Which insight I commend to the more excitable/paranoid in the bloggersphere...

But seriously...it's really important to understand name and head-off for this bias as we look to explain why a particular seismic shift in mass behaviour has taken place (Feels like my Olevel "Causes of the First World War" notes, now). The bigger the shift, the more likely we are to attribute that shift to a big cause.

Watch out!

More copying

Mark Buchnan's new book is out now. Just dived in today: think we have another HERDER.

Go here for his blog.

Madness of crowds

Hat tip to Sair for this little beauty. Everything they warned you about.

Late addition (well, it is my birthday and I see no point in being serious any longer): worshipping the sock man.

Get me some of that enthusiasmos, bartender and be quick about it...

Computers on legs

Johnnie has a really good description with what's wrong with our models for human behaviour - for employees and customers. We are NOT computers on legs.

Hat tip to Stephen for spotting this: more research reveals how i. irrational ("curious economic decisions") men can be ii. how humans seem designed not for maxing one-off decisions or exchanges but for multiple, iterative interactions with other people...

You can't be social by yourself

Josh is on the money again (quoting the Motorola blog):

"When we talk about the “user experience” the main emphasis is often on an individual’s experience with a particular technology. Even with a purported social technology, for example a social networking site, we still tend to create for the individual’s interaction with the site (how does someone find their friend, how do they access this site easily from a mobile device).

However, designing for sociability means thinking about how people experience each other through the technological medium, not just thinking about how they experience the technology. The emphasis is on the human-to-human relationship, not the human-to-technology relationship. This is a crucial difference in design focus. It means designing for an experience between people."

Now for all you advertising and communication Johnnies and Brand Bunnies out there, write this down: It means designing for an experience between people
because that's what real life is about - other people.

Keep up at the back now

Made to be together

Hat tip to Rory for this

William Syndrome is yet another medical condition that reveals how deep the programming of humanoids is to be and interact with other people.

Big questions: no.1 Why is psychology "wrong"? (2)

Ok, here's a couple more big reasons why it's not so useful a frame (forgetting whether it's right or not).

1. Psychology as we understand it in the West is primarily about individuals. As Robert Farr points out, American-led Social Psychology was deliberately shaped by its leaders as primarily a discipline about individual behaviour and responses NOT about group behaviour.

2. This would be ok if we were actually interested in individual behaviour, but we're not: we're interested in the behaviour of large numbers of folk and as Bernard Cova points out, aggregating up individual isolated responses misses a great deal (now Rory, just throw away the individual-channels that we can use to reach individuals - I'm talking about people and not channels).

3. Moreover, most Psych abstracts individuals from their context: other people. It puts them - we think - at the mercy of our super-fantastic-all-powerful brand marketing activity. It's a lot less messy, isn't it? But that doesn't make it right. Or accurate.

4. In the real world their interaction with each other is crucial to the behaviour of individuals. So, even the Social Psych gang tells less than half of the story because it's always trying to root things back in the individual context.

I happen to think that at the root of this lies an important cognitive bias that all of us have: we find it really much easier to respond to individual others than to the confusion of the group. It's easier to think of the face in the crowd than the crowd. Now there's a psychology insight that might be useful...

That's enough for now, eh?

Big Questions: no.1 Why is psychology "wrong"?

Top evening out last night (thanks Matthew & Steve & co). And some fascinating conversations. One above all with Ellie which prompted this - my 200th - post on the Herd blog. (Don't think I'll save the big questions just for round numbers but it seems a good point to do this one as there's something in New Scientist this week which points in this direction, also.)

I think we've gone wrong in our attempts to understand, describe and predict mass behaviour in an over reliance on the discipline of psychology. This is not to say that all psychology's findings are necessarily wrong or without merit; no, to be absolutely clear about it: psychology as we understand it (that is in its applied and diffused form) is based on a number of assumptions about humans that are just plain wrong.

i. that individuals are self-determining agents (they act independently of each other).
ii. that it is the internal mental processes of the individual which are important in shaping the behaviour of that individual (the thinking - conscious or unconscious - is the bit that counts)
iii. that individuals can examine and report their own internal processes and their actions accurately

Now, I'm aware the headline to this post seems like a big and blunt assertion: as in so many disciplines there are almost as many differences of opinion as there are folk to have opinions and within the psycological world there are folk who do not accept all 3 of these assumptions (or those, like the Freudians who have their own particular crosses to bear). That said, I think these assumptions cover much of the ground we would accept of psychology-as-she-is-in-the-world (psychology as we know it).

And why is it important to expose the wrongness of psychology? Does it really do any harm? Couldn't we just accept the frame is a bit cock-eyed, the data less than perfect (we could blame the complexity of humankind, couldn't we?) and let it do what it does, let itplay the role it does in society? After all, there's nothing better yet to understand human behaviour, is there?

Well, Yes. And no. And No (in roughly that order).

It's important to expose the 'wrongness' of psychology because as Pinker puts it it distorts our scholarship and science and everyday lives: it produces a map that is inaccurate and that, like the eugenic-driven pseudo science of phrenology, can lead us to dark places as well as dead ends. So Yes, it does do harm.

And no, we shouldn't just accept the faulty nature of the framework. We wouldn't accept the framework of phrenology as a means to understand and predict human behaviour because we know it's based on silly assumptions about human nature and behaviour*. So why should we do the same with the psychology frame? Of course phrenology and psychology both provide answers and of course both sets of answers are less than perfect. But they are less than perfect because the assumptions behind the models are wrong not because the practice is per se wrong or willfully misleading.

And finally, there are other frames. A large number of the posts here feature other ways of thinking about and describing human behaviour based on the different assumptions to those on which psychology-thinking rests: that other people are they key influence on individual behaviour and that thinking and internal processes have little to do with shaping individual behaviour (we just tend to do stuff and then make sense of it later - NS suggests that it this is true for up to 90% of human life).

So for the record: why are psychology's assumptions wrong?

First, we know from social conformity research and the other behavioural sciences that the influence of others is much more pervasive than any one agent would like to admit. Zimbardo for example points out that that it is the situation that shapes how otherwise good people do bad things rather than their volition or nature; Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling underlines how most human life is a response to a context which consists largely of other individuals' responses to a context of other individuals' responses. Copying is the key learning strategy for our species (not just for our children; it continues throughout our lives) and in fact more for our species than other primates. As Alex and Duncan point out copying accounts for much of what is needed to model behaviour cascades in populations...

Second, as a result, the internal processes that we - children of the "I" culture - would like to believe are the real drivers of our individual actions are necessary to a useful account of how human behaviour is shaped turn out to be much less important than we think. On the one hand, our consciousness has been shown to overclaim it's own importance: Libet is amongst those showing how our sense of deciding something comes after the behaviour has started and not before (but is retrofitted by our minds). And contary to our experience - and the widespread assumption in Western culture since the Ancient Greeks - our opinions and attitudes tend to change after our behaviour rather than before it. As the NS points out, our conscious mind tends to play much less of a role in shaping our future behaviour than in making sense of present and past behaviour.

Third, it is widely recognised in the academic end of market research that individual consumers are unreliable witnesses to their own lives. Unfortunately, some practitioners together with other audiences (including the users of the data) insist that things are otherwise and carry on looking for "consumer-truths" to be revealed by witnesses or for individuals' accurate assessments of their own future behaviour to be accessed by "just the right technique" or methodology. And of course, as the Recovered Memory Syndrome scandal shows, if you are convinced of what you will find, you can sort the data to suit just about any hypothesis, blaming the tools or "being in denial" if you don't find what you're after (or others don't agree). The amount of energy exerted to compensate for or overcome the unreliability of individuals as witnesses to their own lives suggests to me that this is a real problem even for those who accept assumptions i. and ii are wrong. The experience that each of us has our of lives is captured in assumption iii. Giving that up seems to be just too much for any of us (even I struggle that my sense of my own knowledge and guidance of my life is illusory...it would be easier to pretend otherwise.)

So what do we do about this? How do we move forwards? Here are some suggestions:

1. I think that - as the therapeutic cliche puts it - we need to admit we have a problem. That psychology is a partial science at best and that it is in the minority of behavioural sciences in assuming that individuals shape their own behaviour independently of others.

2. There are a number of other approaches and ways of thinking about things which seem to add up to something more well-evidenced to deal with our social - HERD - nature. The collision between Anthropology (in its many forms), Sociology and behavioral economics is a good place to start. Ethnography is a key tool for this, as is behavioural observation.

3. Accept that within this new frame you don't get quite the same questions and answers to worry about (the discipline of psychology is very much a product of the culture in which it arose so it deals in issues around why individuals do things, how they reason and the role of traits vs. other factors). Don't just do what the neuromarketers have done and squeeze all the new learning into the same old frame.

4. Check yourself: because of the culturally-resonant assumptions behind psychology-led frameworks, you'll find yourself slipping back into the "I" way of thinking again and again.

At the end of the day, the choice is this: do you want to stick with bump-like ways of explaining,describing and predicting human behaviour which you know to be fundamentally wrong or do you want to do the job properly?
Answers on a postcard please.

* Well actually we do accept some of the most important assumptions of phrenology which psychology has borrowed: for example, the idea that the brain is seat of the mind (not entirely true as modern neuroscience is largely agreed that the brain is only part of the nervous systems and not the whole deal by any means). Or the strange idea that the brain has specialisations which act independently of each other...one very popular with popular science - remember the debate around the search for the buy-button?

Business, Brands and Society

From the Herd point of view, the consensus that has prevailed for the last couple of decades - that business' primary (or only) rightful concern is with its shareholders interests has alwas seemed vapid.

Struck today by the hollowness of the consensus with 2 articles from the McKInsey archive here and here. In the first (based on a survey of US business leaders), the authors suggest that engaging in society is seen by a minority of business leaders as something like old-school smalltown philanthropy; in the second, the authors argue for engagement with society as the means to combat the many voices critical of business - as if it were a mere tactical move.

It's clearly bollock: business has to engage with society because it is already engaged, even if it would like to stick its fingers in its ears and wail "la, la, la, not listening". Business exists in a context other than itself: it is more than the factories and process charts that it uses to describe itself. It involves a bunch of folk who are connected to other folk, in the world. And everything it does has a social impact on its customers.

Years ago, (well, nearly 10) the great Henry Mintzberg (see pic) wrote a piece in the Sloan (no 'e') Management Review which explained how the separation came about and suggested that the declaration of UDi was based on laziness of the managers: of course it's difficult to balance the interests of shareholders, staff, customers and the wider world. That's why successful managers get paid so well. Choosing not to think about it is...grrrrrrrrrr, just grrrrrrr stupid.

Now, with all of the connectedness and the concern for our shared future (for example that ol' ecological moon again) it seems that some at least in the world of business are waking up to this.

And while we in the world of branding plot and scheme around "social object theory"., "Social media" and the like, it's time we took on board the responsibility we havefor operating in a social context also. Not enough thought gone in to this area of branding, methinks.

Team Shopping and the old revolutionary

Great piece today on R4 on the "team shopping" phenomenon in China: individual consumers team together, to negotiate discounts on things they all want to buy (e.g. decorating materials).

Made me think 3 things (it's always 3 isn't it?)

1. How asian cultures are more happily collective
2. How we've assumed folk from such cultures need "liberating" with democracy (and our other cultural totems)
3. How the trick that Costco etc have missed is getting their "members" to see and connect with each other...now that would be powerful (even for us I-obsessives...)