Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Why be suspicious of claims made by neuro-imaging vendors

I know we've talked about this a lot but here's a nice neat quote saying much the same thing...

"the unit of analysis is individual, yet humans are social animals with brains that have evolved to enable their owners to survive in complex social environments, not to solve abstract problems"

From Genes, Cells & Bones

What kind of thing is the Newton massacre?

I've had a number of messages from folk over the last couple of days asking for my take on the terrible recent events in Connecticut.

Til now I've refrained from commmenting because it's incredibly hard to say anything without seeming crass or exploitative of the grief and sadness of those closer connected to the shootings than I am

And this difficulty is exacerbated by the broo-haha in both mainstream and social media.

So I wanted to make just a couple of points:

1. It's well documented that these kinds of massacres spread through copying (hence "copycat") rather than independent choice.

2. The notion of morally or psychologically pathalogical individuals commiting these kinds of acts is too easy a short-cut and often wrong. As Richard Florida points out, at a population level, mental health is not positively associated with such massacres (though for example poverty is).

So, my American friends, if you want to stop this kind of thing happening again there are at least 2 kinds of thing you need to do together:

i. stop lionising the individuals who commit these kinds of acts in media coverage (both MSM and online)

ii. change the environment to make it harder for individuals to have access to the tools that make it easy to commit such crimes (and, yes, this means regulating the availability of automatic and semi-automatic weaponry - the kind of weapons that make it easier to kill lots of people at once...)

As is so often the case, being clear what kind of thing you're dealing with helps develop better responses to it...

 

 

 

 

Nilsson, artists and the HERD

Following on from my School of Life Sermon on Originality and Copying, here's a nice quote (HT Alex)

"My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode away ahead of the herd and was sort of the look out. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack in the middle of the herd. If you are, you''l be the richest"

Albert Brooks

As Faris has constantly reminded us (following Picasso's dictum), talent copies but genius steals.

 

Face to Face

My review of the excellent Face-to-Face book by Ed Keller and Brad Fay is in this month's Market Leader

[think you need a WARC subscription or membership of the Marketing Society to access]

In a nutshell: a must-read and a useful counter to what you might call our digital over-exuberance. It reminds us of the relative importance of influence the real world and influence online [and as our friends at MarketReach would remind us, Real wins].

Whilst this is in not an anti-digital book, it can be scathing about some of our worst excesses in the rush towards all things coded:

"When the history of the early 21st Century is written, will textbooks observe that internet users spent billions of dollars on 'virtual' animated online farm creatures during the worst economic slump since the great Depression?"

At the same time the combination of clear prose and strong evidence (more than mere collections of anecdote) makes this an excellent and reliable text.

And along the way there's lots to admire:

"The most successful businesses in the future will be the ones that embrace a model that puts people - rather than technology - at the center [sic]...[in particular]they will recognize that people have a far greater impact on each other than we previously realized, and that consumers are not just a collection of individuals"

A must read, even if - as I've mentioned previously - I don't happen to think that word of mouth [what people say] is even the most important part of social influence - it's what we see others do that counts.

It's I'll Have What She's Having NOT I'll do what she's recommending, after all...

 

50 Shades of "I'll Have What She's Having"

Nice piece by the always excellent Victoria Coren in GQ this month exploring (for a male audience) the whole 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon. Here she discusses why women are reading it...

"You can shelve the idea of awkward mimicry; women are not necessarily reading Fifty Shades because they find it sexy anyway.They are reading it for two reasons. First: because everyone else is. There comes a point when one simply has to join in for fear of being left out. But I was the same about getting a recycling bin, and that didn't turn me on much either"

Another example of IHWSH and the People not the Thing thing?

The Letterman Question

Here's a piece I did for the CASRO 2012-13 Journal (based on my keynote at their annual gathering in Scotssdale (page 42ff) based on an idea that the brilliant Grant McCracken gave me when I last had lunch with him:

"TV chat show host David Letterman used to play a game with his audience as he sifted the day’s ephemera, asking this simple question of the things he (and his researchers) found to point and laugh at: is this anything? Or, is it nothing? In other words, is the object, behaviour or utterance significant and suggestive of an important trend? Or, is it merely junk? Should we be paying attention to it or should we smile and nod at contemporary culture’s richness as it sweeps past our noses"

So let's ask ourselves before we start "...what kind of thing is the phenomenon we are studying and seeking to explain [or change]? Is it something shaped by the agency of individuals acting independently of their peers or is it something that’s shaped primarily by social means – by the influence of others other than the individual?"

  What kind of thing is this?

Copying & Originality (School of Life Sermon)

 

Amongst the many fun things that I've done this year, this vido of the Sermon I gave at the School of Life in September is one of my faves.

Thanks to the lovely folk at The School of Life for the opportunity, to the audience who turned up on the day and to the folk whose ideas and insights are shamelessly stolen and re-purposed in pursuit of this counterintuitive truth about the importance of copying in our lives and in our work.

 

 

Evaluating prediction

This time of year, we're awash with predictions for the coming calendar, so it's really refreshing to see a regular predictor reviewing the accuracy of last year's efforts in the run up to this year's efforts.

Hats off to The Economist (again).

You may not agree with their analysis or their world view, but at least in this way, they're prepared to hold themselves responsible...

Now fashion, tech and other editors and bloggers could you please follow suit so we can begin to learn to read your speculations a little better?

Oh and HM Treasury and the OBR too? They're consistently poor...

The Thing thing and the People thing

One of the most unhelpful assumptions I come across most when I'm talking about how things spread is this: our assumption that the thing is the thing.

In other words, that in order to spread, a thing (or idea or word) must have something special about it; that it must be something about the thing that makes it spreadable (or "sticky") if you prefer that term.

This works both ahead of time (in our attempts to predict what will spread) and also in retrospect (in post-rationalizing why a particular item has spread and become popular) - darn, are we good at the post-rationalizing success based on some spurious quality of the thing (Subo is a great e.g. of this).

This is such a plausible assumption that for many of us it enjoys the status of self-evident truth. But is it actually true?

Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. And perhaps more often than not in our modern oversupplied decision landscape - where we are faced with too many effectively interchangeable and indistinct choices.

You see, if diffusion is genuinely social - if the spread is genuniely shaped by people following the example of others, the people are as important if not more so than the thing and its qualities in determining the spread.

For example, if a thing is spread by a population tending to follow the example and recommendation of experts or authorities, then its spread will then tend to depend on who those experts are, how visible they and their enthusiasm are etc etc.

Equally if a thing is spread by a population copying in a less directed way (what we've called Copying Peers) - i.e. just following what seems to be popular then again an individual's perception of what other people are doing is essential to the spread of the thing. (this is is an example of what we disparagingly call "fashionable" choices, do denote the relative unimportance of the thing).

[For more details see the 4 box map which lies at the heart of "I'll Have What She's Having - mapping social behaviour"- these two represent the Eastern portion of that map.]

All of which means that if you want to spread something, ask yourself if it's likely to be spread socially or not and worry rather less about the thing thing and more about the people thing,

And don't be surprised if your really good thing doesn't spread or something really pony does become really popular.  Where people-based spread isa concerned, it's a matter of bets, of chance and the unpredictability of what people take from each other. It's a people thing, man.

And don't be surprised if your attempts to replicate a success are less than successful. Again, the people thing makes repeated success much less likely than you'd think.

 

 

 

 

 

I'll Have What She's Having

HT Laura Davies Nice Enfield/Whitehouse spoof of When Harry Met Sally as a partner to the classic Women Know Your Limits sketch?

This copying thing is getting out of hand, eh? Download Bentleyearlsadmap

 

[7.30+ BBC iPlayer UK 0nly]

What's popular is often what drives our choices

A few times this week I've found myself explaining how useful most of us find seeing what other people are doing.

And then PING in my inbox comes this from my good buddy Nick Blunden

So I - and anyone else who receives this - can have what she/they are having, too.

Nuff said.

Science, Science Club and the brain

Been pondering recently how and why (and just the surprise of) science becoming a mainstream cultural phenomenon.

Not just the CERN Hadron Collider (much of the tabloid conversation around which was more Sci-fi than science, more crazy physics professors trying to destroy the structure of reality...etc etc)

But also the more general excitement and enthusiasm around science and science-based content - BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, the irrepressible Prof Brian Cox's Astronomy shows and Dara O Briain's Science club

Some of this is clearly to do with the rise of the geek as a cultural identity, some of it a reaction to the terrible wibbly wobbly irrationality and superstition of the vaccine refusniks, homeopathy proseltysers and the religious fundamentalists.

But let's be honest, little of it has anything to do with actual rational & independent choice. 

Most of this - as yesterday's post about Alex & Mike's NYT piece suggested - is likely shaped by people copying each other, not by them making rational decisions based on the evidence. That said, it's a welcome development given the times.

How strongly this shift in attention to science and scientific work compares with the "personal opinions" on abortion and premature birth survival rates that certain UK ministers have expressed (which are clearly contradicted by the evidence).

And in our own part of the forest, with the over claimed certainties and inappropriate precision of so many vendors of what some call "neurononsense", "neuromania" or just plain "brain porn" (aka Neuromarketing).

How delightful then to watch Prof Uta Frith and other neuroscientists on the latest episode of Dara's show (particualry Frith) with their humour, humility and honesty remind us that we're really on at the beginning of understanding how individual brain activity relates to behaviour.

As my old headmaster would say, "mark and note".

 

Social neuroscience: games and social hurt (Amended)

Lovely feature in this month's NS which uses "Cyberball" (see above) - a game for 3 players (actually only 1 and 2 computer stooges) to explore the neuroscience of ostracism.

Yes, that's right, HERDmeister is recommending a piece of neuroscience...ring out those bells

Social neuroscience is the coming thing: it's one thing to understand the neurophysiological basis of individual responses but to understand better how our interactions with each other effect us....

Folk like Marco Iacaboni whose excellent work on mirror neurons and John Cacioppo's fab Loneliness book which traced the real physiological (including neurophsyiological) impact of chronic loneliness are among those laying a great path.

Given how important we know that social influence is and the centrality of social to the diffusion of ideas and behaviour, this seems like the beginning of something really exciting.

Watch this space...

 

NB AMENDED December 5th: I inadvertently elided the eminent Iacaboni and Cacioppo. Apologies to you and them.

Copying, Science and the great unwashed

Really nice piece in this week's New York Times by my two co-authors, Professors Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien which shows how recognising the patterns in widely available data allows you determine how different phenomena are spreading.

In this case - and reassuringly so - climate scientists adoption of key terms seem much less prone to the boom-and-bust patterns that the general public generate (as a result of what we call "undirected copying" in I'll Have What She's Having or "Copying Peers" in our long-standing commercial business).

So - whatever your personal view on climate change - it's good to know that the scientists don't seem to be vulnerable to a simple "herd-effect" - they're not copying each other blindly.

And, as ever with these two delightful and erudite gents, the prose is pellucid and enthused with a generosity of spirit that I like.

One to cut out and keep.

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday SMS and a few thoughts on what wins

Pic c/o HAZ.de

Today it's 20 years since (the company that became Vodaphone) sent the first SMS "text" message (c/o a young engineer Neil Papworth, above), "Merry Christma" [sic].

Lots of noise in the news (read this text interview) and on the wires today about this anniversary* and lots of good commentary around the unexpected success of this technology (although much of the US steadfastly refused to adopt it for a number of years...).And much sense spoken about it...e.g.

It's hard to imagine not having access to this technology and hard to underestimate its importance and not just to teenagers - I remember teaching my own late mother who spent a decade in a wheelchair to text and it connected her to the outside world in all kinds of ways (this is also the origin of my "#chocsawayalgy tweets, btw).

For me, several things stand out the success of this technology:

1. SMS was not the best technology then and isn't the best now - we tend to assume the best will win or (after the fact) equally that the winners must somehow be the best

2. Rather, if you wanted to be pseudo-Darwinian about it, you might suggest SMS was the fittest - that it was most suited to the context - cheap, short, flexible, etc - ideal for economically-challenged young folk who desperately want to interact with each other, all the time.

3. This would imply that the mobile telco's just misunderstood the reality of the consumer context and presumed that the high-spending customers (business folk) - that is, people more like how they saw themselves - would necessarily be the key adopters of new technology (a mistake we've all seen lots of times).

4. However, you could also see the relative lack of importance of a superior product as strongly  indicative of a socially-led adoption - these technologies are undoubtedly spread this way, aren't they? Indeed, the lack of marketing input to drive adoption (until the telco's had woken up to the scale of the adoption and that very late in the day) supports this point of view.

So if you're thinking about technology of any sort and how to spread it, ask yourself:

a. does it have to be the best to win?

b. is it the people like you that are really going to drive success?

c. how can you help them to help you spread it?

In other words have a good look at HERD and IHWSH again...

 

*BTW have a look at this 10th anniversary review...