Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Individualism: why Behavioural Economics is a dead-end

Read a very disappointing Green Paper from the Cabinet Office (HMGovernment's policy HQ) today on Charitable Giving. 

Disappointing not for the recommendations per se (up to you to make your mind up of what you think of them politically) but on the quality of the thinking behind them. Despite having built a crack team to rethink how policy and behaviour change might interact and taking soundings in all kinds of places, they've come up with essentially nothing which is likely to have an impact on the behaviour of the UK population in the area of charitable giving.

Put simply, the paper clings onto the old individualist type of models that have shaped policy for generations. Minister Frances Maude: [my italics]

"Social action is not something that government can, or should, compel [individual] people to do; it has to be built from the bottom up, on the back of free decisions by individuals to give to causes around them. This is not easy, particularly given the pressures of life in 21st century Britain. For many of us it can feel like a struggle just to keep up with commitments spanning work, family, and friends.

So the call to social action needs to speak to individuals’ motivations and account for the obstacles to giving; to fit with people’s lifestyles and interests. In short, giving should be made as easy and attractive as possible"

No surprise, maybe, given that the Nudgers and the Peacock Tailors are the key source of insight into human behaviour (what tosh btw is the essay on Human Nature?).

As we've observed before, both these schools cling on to the default setting for thinking about our species as a fundamentally individualist one and human behaviour as a fundamentally individual phenomenon (rather than the fundamentally social one we've been arguing for). (And no, it's not good enough to mention "social influence" or gesture wildly at "social norms" as if they were something that got done to individuals and thus easily fabricated - our social species takes influence from those around us and co-creates social norms with the many hundreds and thousands of folk we share our world with - without understanding the mechanics of these kind of things, you're unlikely to get them working for you)

I think it was Emile Durkheim who noted that something qualifies as an ideology when it stops being an assertion or assumption and just becomes part of how we see the world.

Until we get beyond this Individualist Ideology embedded in the neo-dismal sciences, nothing much is going to change round here and that's a really big worry for both Big Society Fans and the rest of us.

 

A very social Yuletide message

From this week's New Yorker: HT @hitsamty

"Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people"

It's a nice piece which explores solitary confinement in US prisons and what it does to those who are kept separate from their peers.

Christmas is not a good time to be alone but for many of us it can be hard to be with others (particularly relatives whom you've spent another year avoiding).

Think of this over the next few days - our species is fundamentally adapted for a world of others and (tiresome though your relatives might be) they are all you'll ever have.

I think that this is what the priest officiating at my mother's funeral earlier this year meant when he said, 

"in the end, it's only people that matter - that's all we ever have"

So try make the most of the time you share. One day, they and you'll both be gone.

Claimed vs. Actual: real and present dangers

HT @joelrubinson

Interesting example of the huge gap between what people claim to do and what folk actually do. Of course, the difference is not always so obvious or so large as it is here but some kind of difference there is likely to be.

Note also how embarrassing it can be when you take market research literally and assume that people know what they do, how they do it and that they can tell market researchers/therapists/themselves so.

Think about it next time your considering a survey or the data it generates.

Free gift: demonstration that the web isn't really built on cats but mice

 

 

Big Shorts love (live)

Fingers crossed: next Tuesday eve (weather and viruses various permitting)

For those who like their Christmas slightly less Dickensian and more in-a-Camden-stylee, looking forward to seeing you. Dresscode: as you are (although Fez's always look good).

And yes (c/o @Saramarshall) we've got a new way (see above) to share the Big Shorts love....(it helps fans recognise each other....)

Copy, copy, copy (again)

Interesting study suggesting that the way we copy each other in our interactions shapes our ability to understand each other's speech and thus improves our social interaction.

HT Simoleonsense.com

Pic c/o Getty Images via John Flood blogspot

 

 

The Illusion of I (revisited)

HT Sair

Of course, only you and I are individuals - the rest are sheep....

 

Predicting the unpredictable

It's easy to imagine that things are predictable if you could only the right stuff about them. The market research industry's methodological armsrace is predicated on just this thought.

In the music industry, the ability to predict the future has always had real and tangible value (spotting the successful and signing it before it gets to be successful is a sure fire way for labels and managers to make cash).That's why the labels constantly refer to A&R folk as "the guy/girl who discovered/signed X..."

This piece about the UK's Xfactor (whose final was last night) from Hitwise which turned out to be precisely wrong is a case in point: Matt won.[HT @Dancall1]

But it's the thinking behind the approach that's nonsense: we've known for a long time that the way music spreads through a population is not based on the quality of the music itself but on the jumbled interaction of the agents involved (aka random copying). We don't buy/download/vote independently in the real world (online or off-); we do what others are doing - so what assume otherwise?

This distributed form of social learning creates patterns of great volatility that make it genuinely impossible to predict what will win (as in be most popular or most voted for etc). Unless of course, you find yourself (by chance) the winner or runner up (the reason why these kind of competitions do such good business for the labels afterward is that being the winner acts as a shorthand for popularity to everyone else - for at least one release). For most contestents, then, the best bet is probably "horsemeat".

If you really want to improve (but not beat) the odds, then you could do a lot worse than talk to these lovely peeps. Using the power of "We-research".

Living with "I'll have what she's having"

 

Thanks to the Marketing Society for reposting this piece I did for their great house mag, Market Leader on the work I've been doing recently on Social Learning

Behavioural Economics fans, take note: you're only half-way there...

And for the rest of you, here's the original source of "IHWSH"

 

 

 

 

 

What they're having

Was recently sitting in the cafe opposite The School of Life with TSOL's own Morgwn chewing the fat when we noticed a small tour group gathering in front of the shop.

Then, as we watched, the tour guide do her spiel in the driving rain, we spotted several passers-by attracted by the crowd to cross the road, stand and listen, too, before they wandered off.

Another great example of how we outsource cognition - use other people to tell us where the good stuff is