Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Monkey see, monkey do

Had this great book by neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni around for a while and have been re-reading it properly, prompted by contact with the great man.

The way It describes the story of the discovery of 'mirror neurons' by the team in Palma is excellent.

[If you've not been paying attention, these 'mirror neurons' are the unusual braincells which provide the basis for our species' extraordinary ability for interpersonal skills by straddling the motor and cognitive systems in every way.]

I think it's just tiptop. This opening passage gives you a taster:

"When we get right down to it, what do we human beings do all day long? We read the world, especially the people we encounter, My face in the mirror first thing in the morning doesn't look too good, but the face beside me in the mirror tells me that my lovely wife is off to a good start. One glance at my eleven-year-old daughter at the breakfast table tells me to tread carefully and sip my espresso in silence. When a colleague reaches for a wrench in the laboratory, I know he's ging to work on the magnetic stiulation machine, and he's not going to throw his tool against the wall in anger...[]...we all make dozens - hundreds - of such distinctions every day. It is quite literally, what we do...

[for a long time] nobody could begin to explain how it is that we know what others are doing, thinking and feeling.

Now we can. We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are at the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally"

Now go buy it and read it for yourself

Pic credit Andrew N Meltzoff (whose innovative work in the 70s demonstrated how early the copying mechanism operates in humans...)

It's the human stuff, stupid

Nice piece tucked away in Adage Digital which reminds us that however we get excited by the promise of particular technologies, the answer normally lies in some all-too-human stuff that we might otherwise overlook. All too often (NHS database project, ID cards) we look to big tech stuff to solve the problems in front of us, rather than thinking about simple, human-scale answers that might get us much of the way there, quicker and cheaper, too. Technology as 'magic' science...?

So rather than getting overexcited by the technological equivalent of Frodo's magic Ring - in this case using twitter and twitter analytics to market your goods and services proactively - it's often better just to sit and listen hard to what customers are doing and saying. From this you might even work out how to make the thing better and worth your customers interacting with each other around...

A generation of individualists?

Pic from flickr

Have a look at all those kids at this summer's festivals.

Read their tweats and the FB posts. Watch how they dress and how they talk. How they behave.

Of course, they all believe they're unique individuals, but - gathered in their tens of thousands - are they really so individual?

Is this anything other than the gathering of the young folk 

What does it all mean then?

Pic c/o inkstains

Here - c/o Surinder and the Brainjuicer gang - is a video of me pondering the implications of all this new cognitive and behavioural science stuff (and getting a bit over excited) - at a recent HSBC-hosted free festival

If you've not seen me do my schtick before, I'm told this is a pretty good intro...

You'll also find the rest of the Brainjuicer show and Faris's cool "be nice or leave" gig

Back on the pitch - social proof or just plain old copying?

Pic c/o inkycircus.com

Back from my sojourn in Spain revived and with fresh eyes.

First thing up [hat tip Nico Herzog] is this neat little idea for social change which uses copying at its core mechanism (or what the great Cialdini - the inhouse scientist - calls 'social proof')

Positive Energy creates:

software that assesses energy usage by neighborhood. Results are sent to consumers on behalf of their local utility, praising you with a row of smiley faces (you’ve used 58 percent less electricity than your neighbors this month!) or damning you with none (you used 39 percent more electricity than your neighbors in the past 12 months, and it cost you $741 extra)....

And of course it works in the same way as the big C has described previously for hotel towels (Monkey see, monkey do). As the Atlantic journo puts it:

In Positive Energy’s reports, a once-intangible bit of social information—how much energy you use relative to your neighbors—is made tangible.

Or "visible" as Josh's supercool visualisation of Amazon's social design underscores. 

I know "social proof" seems nicer and more acceptable in mixed company, but can we just be honest here: we're talking about a when-in-Rome...copying type of behaviour; 'social proof" makes it sound like there's some deliberation going on - like individuals are prone to acting independently of others unless you force them to do otherwise - when what we're talking about is enabling folk to see each other so that they do what humans normally do i.e. copy their peers.

Shaping perceptions of what folk round here & folk like us do is what the whole game's about

Great initiative though and I'm sure Rory will be adding it to his list!

M

Twitter degree

Pic c/o tveskov

HT The lovely Jamie

Don't get me wrong, I love my twitter and my fail whale but...

...a "Twitter" degree?

Bloody students...

Communication without messaging

Neat little example of gestural communication (i.e. non-informational) that is being used to get cyclists on our local canal to slow down

No message but nonetheless impactful: remember it's not what you say that counts, it's what you do.

For now, let's just say it's a good marker for how advertising of the future might be.

Or is it just the rift opening under Camden...?

More Cognitive Outsourcing

Nice study here that echoes the work of Jens "robofish" Krause, showing how fish learn from the behaviour of their peers.

Cognitive outsourcing, I call it.

And you and I do it all day long btw, using the responses of those around us to guide our behaviour (largely without realising that that's what we're doing...)

Human is the new black

Very interesting evening last night hosted by the IPA 44 club:

Newly elected IPA president Rory Sutherland and RSA CEO Matthew Taylor speaking around (mostly around) the subject of the new human sciences and how important they are to our ability to do our jobs.

For both of these great idea-hungry speakers, the cluster of learnings in the unfolding worlds of behavioural economics and all the stuff I write and talk about - broadly what falls under what the RSA calls the Social Brain Project  - are central to their plans for their respective organisations

All I can say is how refreshing it is to hear the leaders of two organisations get excited by ideas about human beings and evidence for those ideas and what the implications might be...

For too long, we've suffered with a culture of leaders-as-managers (leaders concerned only with the concerns of the organisation) or leaders-as-front-men (leaders as spinners and distractors). Imagine if this stuff was part of leadership's remit in your organisation?

Being human. Understanding human. Speaking and acting human. It's the new black

Who are these buffoons?

Just read this piece about social media and direct marketing that come up on the Twitterfeeds from the curiously named Strongmail

Tell me what you think is wrong with this statement:

"A natural extension of email marketing, Social Direct puts the marketer in control to send targeted and personalized messages to vibrant and fast-growing social communities"

I'm not sure where to start. What about "personalized vs. "communities"? "Natural extension to email..."?

Or more simply, "puts the marketer in control"?

Where do these people get off? What planet are they from?

Tate Fail

Ambling along Bankside yesterday morning with two teenagers, I thought the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall worth a short visit.

The play exhibit - a recreation of the 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings show - seemed like a good idea

The only thing being how unplayful it is.

Ok, so I'm not sure it's the art's fault - our expectations of interaction with exhibits are worlds away from the timid ones of 4 decades ago. Gaming is just one of the practices which has taught us to expect more.

But the army of 20 something 'curators' spent most of their time telling visitors not to do what ever it was they wanted to do. "You're not supposed to do it that way" one told me. "Why?" "Because".

And it's worth noting that they took a particular poor view of the presence of two (nice white middleclass) teenage lads with me. "Can't you see it's for kids?" one was rudely told off.

So sorry, Tate. FAIL

How things spread (again)

I missed this one, but well spotted, eagle-eyed Jaime And Neil P:

The silly story of the 3 Wolf T-shirt

Amazing how what other people do and say will shape what we do...

After Btween09

As I post this, the gang still in Liverpool are still enjoying day 2 of Katz's fabulous Btween Conference.

I did the keynote yesterday morning (less a speech than an experience, I hope) - here's the lovely Alfie taking part in a keynote (as opposed to listening to one)

And as suggested by e.g. Eaon last week, I played the Sasquatch dancing man video again (even tho' it'd gone round twitter and both Seth and Jon Mac had blogged it on the Wednesday)

While everyone seems to get the point about copying and following others, what struck me (as with comments in the blogosphere from folks like Jon and Seth) was how often people looked to the fat (Seth's 3rd) guy. He's the missing link they say, between early adopter/innovator and mass.

I disagree: while the 3rd (or 5th or whatever) guy is important in retrospect (he turns out to have been the 3rd or fourth or whatever), he's not really that significant; I think the important stuff to watch is how the sight of other folk getting so excited about joining in makes other observers.

In other words, its the easily-influenced and not the influential that matters. Worth remembering, I reckon...

Well done, Katz and all the Btweeners. Best conference I've been to this year. I learned heaps and - let's be honest, such lovely, lively and interesting folk. Roll on next year!

Give folk something to do together (vol 207)

Full story here

Can I just suggest you avoid Hyde Park tomorrow? Just a thought.

A case in point: men and doctors

"Why don't men go to the doctor more often?", asks the Guardian newspaper

   

They drink more than women.
    They smoke more than women.
    They don't live as long as women.
    They engage in more high-risk activities than women.
    They moan more about having a cold than women (OK, maybe this one isn't a         scientifically proven fact. But it's true).

Good question.  What do you think? Have a read of the comments as well as the (hmmm) slightly men-bruising column. Lots of "reasons" why not here, lots of "excuses", also. Full-on individualism all round.

Let's just say, I'm not shure it will help thinking about "men going to the doctor" as an example of independent self-determining agency.

What if we don't do it because we don't think other men do it either?

Jury of your peers

Slight sense of trepidation before this evening's show: am talking to a dozen of the brightest and best in London's advertising world - rising stars who are studying for the IPA Excellence Diploma

(here's a clue how smart they are - just a couple of years ago, Faris was doing this)

I'm sure it'll be fun but I expect sharper questions than usual...

Downright downloading nonsense

As we've pointed out before , many of the public pronouncements that government and music industry spokesmen make about illegal downloads are wrongheaded at best but now it seems that they can be deliberately misleading.

Ben picks on the the latest coverage in the UK press (the Sun & Mail) of some particularly dodgy estimates of what downloading costs.

Let's hope the arithmetical skills improve before the Digital Britain report comes out in a couple of weeks...

Btween you & me

Very much looking forward to my time at Btween in Liverpool on Thursday & Friday.

Expecting to learn a lot - which is a great feeling as a keynote speaker!

Hope to see you there!

Thank you

 

Pic c/o Sydney Morning Herald Online

"It's not about me, it's about you" suggested the (then) Junior Senator from Illinois, way back in the snowy presidential primaries some 18 months ago.

It's hard sometimes to remember that being successful is only ever partially the result of the successful person or company's actions: mostly it's a team game - a result of all those participating in the bigger picture. This I suspect leads to a number of problems for folk (like musicians) who suddenly get to be successful - they think it's mostly their own actions that drive their popularity so no wonder they find it difficult to cope with (the inevitable) subsequent lack of success.

So as I prep for a conversation tomorrow with a client whom I haven't seen for a few years now and ponder how far the HERD thing has come since we last talked, I just wanted to say thank you to all of those who have argued, debated, contributed and commented not just here but (rather more importantly) elsewhere in the big conversation.

This HERD thing wouldn't be anywhere near as resonant and topical today if it weren't for you - no matter what you think of the work I've been doing here and elsewhere.

Thank you.

Being british

This enormous tome landed on my doorstep the other day.

Me and 30 odd of my closest friends exploring the theme of Britishness today - and yes, that's me in the list of authors there between the delightful Matt D'Ancona and that cleverclogs S Fry Esq!

Go on, it's all for charity!