Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Choosing wine: a people-thing or a thing-thing?

Pic c/o Fulldorm.com

Interesting post over at the Guardian about some research suggesting wine experts are not the best folk to turn to to help you choose wine.

Couple of things here:

1. It's not that surprising, given the difficulties in choosing from large and often indistinguishable wine options that regular people often follow the recommendations of those they see as experts - outsourcing the cognitive load, we call it, to those we imagine know better. In other words, that choosing wine is often a people-thing rather than a thing-thing. We equally use heuristics like a. what I recognise b. what I see other people drinking (I'll have what she's having), what's culturally appropriate (red wine with meat) or we might use price as an indicator (with all of the framing effects that Behavioural Economists love to talk about).

2. Nor is it surprising that the experts too find it difficult to choose, too. Or that they also defer to experts and expertise that they discern from others. The notion of expertise in any field tends to be much more culturally than empirically-based - i.e. it's a people not a thing-thing. There are lots of examples of how bad expertise advice can be; don't forget, Tversky & Kahnemann's early work on human inability to calculate probabliities was based on work comparing patients and medical professionals (and the latter proved just as prone to the cognitive biases described as those who looked to them for advice).

What strikes me is how odd it seems to us that experts don't know and can't tell products apart. And how disappointed or wronged we feel at the news that they don't know. We make sense of our use of copying experts in terms of some supposed expertise about the thingness of our choices and this seems to be undermined by experts' failure to deliver. (Tom Ewing's musings on how the role of chance in popular music are always worth a listen...

All of which serves to remind us that many more things than our default assumption that choosing is primarily done as a thing-thing is wrong; far better to assume it's a people-thing.

 

 

 

 

Suicide as a disease and the space between

Interesting piece in this week's New Scientist on the attempts by psychiatrists (particularly those with advanced neuromania) to explain suicidal behaviour through primarily biological means (in terms of brain abnormalities, genetics and epigenetics)

Shame really that the conversation starts off from such a poor premise:  "Until the 1980s, people who committed suicide were considered, by definition, to be depressed" (i.e. to be a function of individual pathology).

As we wrote early on in the history of this blog, the outbreaks of suicide that many populations see are often better explained by social means than as a function of individual agents.

In other words, by what happens in the space between us rather than the space between our ears.

Just striking how wilful psychiatrists and their like are in ignoring the social perspective. Shame - Durkheim is very beautiful and clearly written.

 

Related articles

Is Suicidal Behavior A Disease?

Teenage pregnancy and the HERD

Interesting piece here about what does and doesn't work to reduce teenage pregnancy in the UK - written from the perspective of the audience (or a recent graduate from teenage).

However, one of the things these personal accounts tend to miss is the higher level social mechanisms.

Daniel Nettles of Newcastle University classic work suggests that early onset of reproduction in human populations is something that is the result of the population (not an individual) feeling under critical pressure. His analysis suggests the variation in regional rates across the UK is simply explained by this factor.

A useful reminder: before you rush off trying to get an authentic "user" perspective on a problem to define your solution, don't forget to look at bigger and broader factors like this. How things are may be a result of "we" forces that "I" can't begin to see.

 

 

Physicists as Celebs

Nice piece in this week's NS about a plan to use a prize to create celebrities of our best physicists

...all in order to engage the public more with the subject and with science in general.

Which seems eminently HERD-sensible - visibility, social norms etc etc

Being famous didn't do Albert any harm...

 

 

Social spread of prosocial behaviours

Source: Studioportraits.eu

Nice example here of an experiment which supports kinds of social diffusion of positive feelings through a population that Nick Christakis and James Fowler described in Connected

All it takes are two little words: "Thank you"

Smarter than we think

Nice spot by that charming man, Will Humphrey - a piece by Franz de Waal in the WSJ describing how much we underestimate the cognitive powers of our animal cousins. Have a read.

HERD fans will know we've long made this kind of case. We've talked about how Orangs for example, not only have cultures but develop them in the same ways as we humans do our own cultures. 

Denying the connection just messes with our thinking: you know that old saw "Monkey See Monkey Do" - turns out we humans are much better at copying than they (or other primates) are and our (Western) obsession with originality is not the real gift; copying is what makes us.

This is just one of many ways in which we try to separate ourselves from them, when in fact who and how we are has very strong roots in them.We are - for good or ill - a Super Social Ape and not the unique and inevitably successful creature we imagine we are (as the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, if we were to re-run the tape of evolution, it's far from clear that we'd end up as we are or as successful as we are).

Calls for some humility, I'd say

Lotteries, clustering, probability and herd-thinking

Nice piece in this week's Economist on Britain's love affair with gambling and lotteries in particular (HT @lauradavies24)

Lovely descriptions of how - in the face of systematic randomness (yes, past performance has no impact on future performance) we twist ourselves inside out to make choice easier - we use shorthands to pick winners (including following "expert" advice or familiar or "special" numbers) And how we ignore the simple rule that the more familiar the number the smaller the share of any (randomly-allocated) winning ticket.

As we've discussed before, herd-thinking is particularly tricky in financial decision-making - you often need to stand back and consider the facts of the matter (however hard and unnatural that is!)

But at the simplest level, those of us who play the lottery - the "numerically challenged" as some would have us - often do it because everyone we know's doing it...

Crowd, swarm, flock

pic c/o Lukas Felzmann/Wired.com

Nice piece in Wired this month (HT Gareth K) that looks at self-organising crowd behaviour.

Not sure it adds anything to the stuff we've previously pointed at e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here and of course here

And of course it provides a good challenge to Behavioural Economics, forcing us to think about behaviour change above the level of the individual (which is where BE stops)

That said, this stuff is always - as G would say - awesome (literally)

Probes (future probes not space ones)

If you're in London Tuesday next week, here's a great event from the lovely people at Creative Social built around some really stimulating folk who "probe" the future for the rest of us...[like memories of the future]

People like the lovely Grant McCracken

Do yourself a favour and get yourself some...

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The most powerful influence on human behaviour is other people"

Pic c/o [email protected]

Apparently, it's now official: "Perhaps the most powerful influence on human behaviour is other people"

So says, David Halpern, the supersmart chief of the HM Government's Nudge Unit in a piece in the Guardian here - so it must be true.

As you will know dear reader, we''ve been saying for an awful long time that this is true.

We like and admire the work they've been doing testing the insights from Behavioural Econonics and their relevance for policy making. Some genuinely good stuff here.

However,regular readers will also know that we have repeatedly criticised the focus of much such work on individual based models - e.g. in the landmark Mindspace report.

It's nice to know that the evidence base being built up in UK policy circles points much the same way as we - and so many others - have been pointing.

But I wonder if this means a downplaying of all the cognitive quirks mallarky that dominates much thinking in this space...?

Not until other folk do it?

Fair play to you, Mr Chimp

Pic c/o Bitter Waller

BBC have gone ape with an interesting primatology study today: when chimps and infant humans play the Ultimatum game (widely used by economists to determine real world notions of fairness and equity), both species seem to exhibit similar patterns of behaviour and thus - it is suggested - similar notions of fairness. 

While the study does point to similarities, it's worth bearing in mind that what seems to be "normal" human responses often conceals wide cultural variation. Canadian anthropologist Joseph Henrich has repeatedly shown this is so, in bothering to play this kind of game with folk other than Western

Lamalera Whale hunters for example, who depend on each other much more than, say, Kalahari bushmen, tend to make much bigger offers than the norm.

Not that games are wrong - far from it, they're often really useful mode to explore behaviour and embedded attitudes and dispositions- it's just that if we're not careful, we can mistake local variation for generalised truth and - as in this case - genetically-hard wired truths for culturally-shaped ones (and yes, other primates have culture, too)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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...

 

 

 

 

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...

 

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.

 

 

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...

Top Banker: how banking taught us the wrong lesson about financial incentives

"Motivation does not come from financial incentives alone. Again, the financial sector has done us all a disservice in promoting the belief that massive financial compensation is necessary to motivate individuals".

So writes Mervyn King, Chairman of the bank of England. about what might levers we might pull to drive up economic activity.

It's worth cutting this out and keeping it.

If you think people only do stuff for money - or even mostly do stuff for money - you'd be wrong. 

There are lots of other sorts of reward and disincentives - not least is the social stuff that we go on about [people doing what other people do, for instance]. 

Put it this way: financial incentives presume that individuals are primarily financial optimisers, acting independently in their own interest. Paul Ormerod makes this point really well in his new book - "incentives" tend to be part of an "individualist" or "I" model of behaviour.

Some people are focused on financial incentives all the time [we call them things like "greedy mothers"], all of us can be taught to be that way [ditto] but...and there's quite lot of evidence that financial incentives can overwhelm other intrinsic motivations in certain circumstances [prosocial behaviour can actually reduce when you pay volunteers].

But - it's far from clear that financial incentives always have a positive impact in shaping behaviour in the desired direction, be it in personal health, charitable activity or criminal activity. Sometimes they actually have a negative effect [as above] becoming the reason why you continue to do something.

So if you're looking to change behaviour, please be careful with financial incentives: they don't work like they say they do [not least because we're not like they say we are] and they can actually work against the desired outcome.

Look for the other - often [pro]social - motivations.

And as we ponder our own lives, it's worth listening to wise people like Sir Ken Robinson and Hugh Macleod who remind us to focus on our passions and our talents and let the money follow those two.

Whatever it is you do, don't just do it for the money...

 

Copycats everywhere

Amusing story in the UK media today concerning the arrest of Rob Smith (above) who decided to remedy the admin error surrounding the painting gold of a Royal Mail postbox to celebrate the Olympic success of Team GB yachtsman Ben Ainslie. 

It turns out that the original site selected was in Cornwall (where Ainslie grew up) but Lymington is where both men now live. 

So Smith took the brush in his own hands and copied the handiwork seen elsewhere around the country on a postbox near to Royal Lymington Yacht Club - not a tricky thing to do but the obvious response, surely.

In sadder news, I've been struck by the huge cellotaph which has grown outside the home of Tia Sharp's family (12 year old who recently went missing). Flower by flower, card by card, candle by candle & soft toy by soft toy the shrine has grown as individual neighbours follow the example of others' actions to demonstrate sympathy with the family.

I've written about this phenomenon before (not least in HERD) as something shaped by individuals copying the behaviour of others but the thing that struck me in this exaple was the emergence of the particular grammar here: candle, flowers, cards and toys (when did the toys become part of cellotaph design? I've seen a few at cemetaries and road-crossings recently but think this is a new design feature evolving through the same means). 

And in the US, news of yet another campus shooting.

We know that many things good and bad spread via the copycat effect (the Norwegian Anders Breivik not only copied the example of other mass murders but seems to have plagiarised large chunks of unabomber manifesto, too, as if to underline this). 

But don't be mistaken: copying itself is neither good or bad.

It just is and we do it all the time.

 

A bit of a do about a dude's do AKA why "meme" misses the point about memes

 

Many of you might have been distracted by the recent brouhaha in and around London but there's been some interesting discussion around memes on the interwebs recently

With NASA's Mars Curiosity Landing this fella, Bobak Ferdowsi - lead on the activity team at NASA - became a meme.

Partly on account of his "do" and partly...well, make up your own interpretations (as this nice lady does here). 

Of course, there were lots of internet memes which started during the Olympics, my favourite being the funny diving faces...

And of course my tip for the top in Autumn/Winter fashion, the Wiggo Sidie (Tour de France Winner and Olympic champion, Bradley Wiggins sports a fine and distinctive set of ginger sidies here)

which generated a host of real world echoes from Sir Steve Redgrave

To these nice chaps at the cricket (albeit before the Olympics)

And now I learn Daniele, Nick and Graham will be running a marathon in September dressed the same way...maybe using the Mirror newspaper's downloadable stick on sidies....? Download Bradley

OK so my point is this: we all find it very easy and appealing to explain the spread of such things after the fact but most of the time we do it with reference to the thing and its specific characteristics rather than the mechanics which cause it to spread. 

Indeed this is at the heart of the idea of memetics: a meme is

"information that is copied, varied and selected – but the term is usually reserved for those that hit the big time, or "go viral" [Susan Blackmore cited in the Guardian]

The term "selected" here is important - it derives from evolutionary science (memetics being itself an attempt to apply the broad principles of evolution to cultural phenomena). "Selected" infers that there is something specific (and perhaps superior) about the thing/species and its relevance to its environment which explains its success. 

Our discussion of the kind of thing we call "memes" is unfortunately also dominationed by this kind of focus on the thing (the "information"), it's unique characteristics and what its spread reveals about our culture or how people feel (as the Do-dude piece demonstrates:)

"Ultimately, memes spread because on some level, they resonate with their audience" 

While it may make very good Op-Eds and very interesting intellectual showponying, scientifically it is plain nonsense. In biological evolution and in the cultural space, things spread fundamentally because of the copying activity, mostly not because there's anything particularly important or significant about them. It's the mechanic not the thing. 

Of course, it's easy - looking backward with the benefit of hindsight and with reference to the thing and the culture, why that particular thing of all the things that might have spread did spread. But it's really hard to tell ahead of time (which is the important place to start from if you want to make your ponderings useful. 

As the great evolutionist Steven Jay Gould observed, re-winding the tape of evolution will more often than not lead to different outcomes from the one we find - we humans might well not have got so successful.

So whilst spotting the things that "go viral" (and post-rationalising why) is an interesting and diverting pass time, can we try to ask some more important questions, please? Ones less about the thing? 

Like what kind of network did this spread through? What kind of copying is it - what we call directed (focussed on authority or expertise) or undirected

And ditch the "What made the Nasa Mohawk guy such a successful meme", please?

It's not him, it's not it, it's the copiers and the copying that matters.

 

Not a riot on my own

 

So 12 months on from the UK riots, a lot of thinkpieces around in the papers today

Here's one in the FT from the always reliable @Timharford who asks "Why did riots happen? And is that right question?"

And here's the one I wrote a year ago about precisely the same thing http://bit.ly/RkKuvG  

And here's me on the Today programme talking about exactly the same thing. Again a year ago.

Not in anyway suggesting there's any copying going on - Tim & I both read the same sources on the riots but if you want to know about copying, come to my Sunday Sermon on Sept 9th 

But if not here's some nice boys who want a riot on their own (rare enough for a social species like us humans)

Today in the super soaraway...

In a previous post discussing what the 5-ring Circus (see pic) is revealing about us, I mentioned in passing the lessons about national identity.

Today I want to return to this part of the subject and talk about the striking split emerging between those who see the UK through the lens of Henry VIII, Mary Poppins and Beefeaters (and feel uncomfortable at any evolution of national identity from this) and those who see us as 

human kaleidoscope of a country where those of every race, faith and background are a part of a huge and mostly happy family

Not my words but those of the Sun leader writers (yes, I know). 

Of course, it helps that our multiracial Team GB demonstrate their prowess and determination in front of us and that as we look around (in the crowd, in the pub or in front of one of those really huge screens erected in public places) at our fellow supporters we can see the same kind of shared vibrant shared identity reflected back. And that we had such a uplfiting and novel Opening Ceremony to respond to and interact around. 

But it is striking that this view of who we are is being so widely embraced as an agreed definition of who we are...

Sporting events are great for accelerating this kind of social change - remember how the Mexican Wave (la Ola) emerged from the 1986 Mexica World Cup and how other kinds of public phenomena can create widespread change (as I described in HERD) the cellotaphs (floral tributes to road accident victims) emerged from the death of Princess Diana.

Events like this bring people together and help them interact with people they wouldn't normally see and - as they do - they learn behaviour and feelings and opinions from those around them. Exposure to so many people so frequently and so strongly suggests to each of us that a. this what we now do b. this is what we now feel c. this is what we now think. 

What we do, what we feel and what we think we take from those around us. Remember that line from Oscar Wilde? 

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation

Our deeds, our feelings and our words can all become badges of membership and a challenge to them is often treated as a challenge to the tribe of which we are members [which also serves to explain the incredible bitterness of those who resist the new story]

 

And another thing about the Olympics and what it tells us about us.

Probably the smartest thing that LOCOG have done in seeking to engage the UK population is to go local.

By that I mean going 8000 miles over 70 days and visiting countless "locales" - i.e. places where real people live and thrive with other people. The hard yards, you might call it.

And to create the sense of shared excitement for those on the route - offering the chance to thousands of people to participate (and compete to do so) each of which is recognisable in their own locale - it seems to have followed all the rules of the modern engagement strategy.

The torch relay isn't a new idea but nor is it "authentically" Olympian (as the London2012 site tries to suggest) but as this piece shows, it has [ahem] interesting German roots

But it is a fantastic social diffusion idea: gathering crowds of people familiar to each other - or from the same place, at least - getting them excited with anticipation and getting them to see and feel each others' excitement. Flags, cheering, crowds, epic journey - all of these help.

Simple stuff, you might think but not something marketers today can be bothered with doing.

Go where the people are (rather than just shout at them).

Give them something (interesting & fun) to do together.

Help them see the excitement of those around them and those before and after them.

And start well ahead of time (building your audience's excitement well before you need it).

Not tricky, is it?

Key learning is this: audiences are not individuals acting independently - pairs of eyeballs or whatever the media measurement guys count.

Audiences are individuals interacting with each other around your activities. The more you encourage this further things spread.

You're building networks not sending information to individual agents.

 

What do the Olympics really reveal about us?

Pic c/o Telegraph.co.uk

I thought - and I can blame no other than the lovely Matthew D'Ancona for encouraging me - that maybe now would be a good time to add to that ever popular Op-Ed trope which blossoms around the time of global sporting events: what does this thing - this (oh yes) social object - that we're all flocking around (in this case the 2012 Olympics) tell us about ourselves? What hidden truths does it reveal about who and how we are?

A lovely piece in yesterday's Telegraph describes how the interesting opening ceremony reveals a lot about us Brits as a nation (referencing surprisingly the Britishness book that Matt edited and I contributed to) and what we value about our world and our cultural inheritance (which is neither the Beefeater and Bearskin stuff of the tourist trail nor the cycling spinsters and warm beer of former PM John Major's sentimental memory). I've read a number of foreign news reports on journalist's responses to the 'bonkers' opening ceremony (as well as the social media feeds various) and am interested to hear what you made of this (particularly if you hail from outside the UK).

But if I'm honest, I'm really rather less interested in what the whole 5-ring circus tells us about the parochial issue of Britishness but - as you'd imagine - rather more interested in some simple truths about how all behaviour is shaped.

First, there's what you might call the "Vonnegut syndrome": famously, in a late interview, author and hero of many in 1970s and 80s counter culture, Kurt Vonnegut advised:

Form a little society of your own. And, hang out with them. Get a gang

Gangs, tribes, teams - all of these are good, safe and rewarding contexts for us social creatures to live in.

And let's be honest, cheering on for "our team" seems more important than the sport (the thing) itself (unless that sport actually has some other features worth engaging with). Isn't this what the flag waving is really all about? Fans talk about "us" and "we"...as if they were athletes themsleves...

Effectively, the sport itself reveals itself as a social object (despite the efforts and skills of the individual athletes)...as something to interact with other people around.

As Hugh puts it:

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the rea­son two peo­ple are tal­king to each other, as oppo­sed to tal­king to some­body else. Human beings are social ani­mals. We like to socia­lize. But if think about it, there needs to be a rea­son for it to hap­pen in the first place. That rea­son, that “node” in the social net­work, is what we call the Social Object.

Sporting events like the Olympics provide us with a means to gather together - as the Ancient Greeks did - and interact with each other, both those inside our group and those in other groups in safe but nonetheless thrilling ways (some studies suggest that sportsfans' experiences are underpinned by huge swings in testosterone levels, depending on whether their team is winning or losing). 

Second, it's clear that the way that engagement and excitement about the games has built over time - or "cascaded" through the population - through social means, rather than one based on the appeal of the thing itself. Just a few weeks ago, most of the population of London were sceptical; now - post-Boyle - and following the excitement of those around us, it's hard not to feel excited, too. Even grumpy old me.

Everyone seems to be talking about it - at the office, on the bus, on TV, in the pub. Everyone, everywhere is talking Olympics. Different events bring different talking points and different stories to tell to others (from Michael Phelps' extraordinary achievements in the pool to the disappointment of the GB Judo team).  Even the most ardent non sportsfan has something to say about things like these.

That's why the architecture of the venues (and their approaches) is like it is - encouraging intuitive and non-verbal interaction and allowing us to see what others feel, too. Again the Greeks understood this all too well.

Again, the transmission of this excitement is not primarily driven by the events themselves but rather by social means. As Paul Ormerod points out in his latest book, it's genuinely hard for modern humans not to pick up ideas, feelings and behaviour from the many souls with whom we share our (undeniably) social worlds (networks) with.

It's what we do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arguing rights and wrongs

 

Interesting question here (about what evidence it might take to convince a climate change sceptic of the reality of human-generated climate change).

The simple answer - and one worth bearing in mind the next time you try to persuade someone by argument - is this: nothing.

Not because people are stupid (dumb), wilful or ignorant but simply because much of the time the opinions we hold are not based on rational thinking and the impartial sorting of evidence.

People rarely persuade each other to change their points of view by disputation (which is not to say that we don't enjoy a good rhetorical tumble) but this kind of "show me the facts" thinking doesn't shape much of our view of the world. We are highly selective - we only see what we expect to see, distrust and discount the witnesses who present what we don't want and devalue their evidence if they turn out to be from the other side.

Most of our opinions are received opinions - as Oscar Wilde put it disdainfully,

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation"

They're not based on facts and evidence but on other people's (already second hand) opinions. Very often, the trickiest opinions to shift (like articles of faith) are stubbornly resistent because they are badges of membership to some group or other - a necessary cost of membership.

Add to this the fact that often times, they are also post-rationalisations of what you've already done or chosen (as Andrew Ehrenberg famously observed, I have to think my girlfriend is attractive because she is...after all...my girlfriend) and you can begin see the difficulty in lifting distinguished opponents out of their denial mode.

So next time don't try to win the argument - don't worry about the theology of the piece.

Get your opponents to do something - ideally together - and help them change their own minds after the fact.

 

 

Look at me (2): Baking in signals of usership

 

Following on from yesterday's post on the invisibility of Kindle-book titles , here's a nice link from Carol about what the publishing industry's up to.

However, as Jon (@jonhildrew) and I were discussing on twitter last night, while Amazon might find it attractive to feel that taking control of what readers see of others' choices (and locating them online in the walled garden of the Kindle store), this loses something important - for both the marketer and the consumer.

On the one hand, losing the widespread real-world window into what others are doing should significantly reduce our ability to see what is popular and how things are shifting reduce the spread of new and different titles and authors - real world influence being more powerful than online. For marketers for this kind of thing, this is going to make it harder to launch new and unfamiliar titles, authors and genres. Much more focus will need to be paid to POS and promotional deals.

On the other hand, for once, the people who buy books are also going to lose out as much as the marketers. For a long time now, covers have been part of our experience of books and turned them into social objects.

And as signals to be transmitted (intentionally or otherwise) and received and read instinctively. It reminds me of part of what we lost when music went from vinyl to tape (and then to mp3s)

Can't we find a way to bake-in this kind of stuff as Apple have done?

Imagine a football crowd without the scarves and replica shirts....

 

 

 

 

 

The space between

 

Much of the time when we think of populations of individuals - be they political or commercial - we imagine that they are merely an aggregate of those individuals (that's why market research uses the notion of sampling to represent a larger population).

However, mass behaviour is more than the sum of individuals' actions: mass behaviour is more often the result of the interaction of individual agents with each other.

In IHWSH we show how patterns in market-level sales data are fundamentally different when a behaviour is rooted in social rather than independent choices (long tails of popularity distribution vs. short tails of popularity distributions).

Two interesting pieces around today - first, Res Publica's report on the wealth of pre-existing community structures (which is interesting, despite the predictably Trollopian tone of some of their output).

And then the return of the twitter trial and the iamspartacus phenomenon.

Both of these point up the importance of the space between - the space where most stuff really happens

     

Blinded by the technolight

As if by magic: Tom's cartoon explores the underlying technophilia which dogs marekting and policy-making too much. Brain porn or Digital Everything - it's all technophilia, I'm afraid

T'aint what they say

Twice this week, I've sat in a meeting and had exactly the same thought: the researcher here seems to think that what respondents say they do and why they do it is as close to the truth of the matter as damnit!

Fact: it mostly isn't.

So please remember that segmentation is based not on what people actually do and why but on what they tell you they do and why. The respondents are "presenting" as if...

And dear researchers, could you get into the habit of being more explicit, please? "this is what this group of people tended to tell us about what they do but it's probably not quite like that at all..." etc

Missing the point: thinking about behaviour beyond the individual

In the last post, I tried to articulate what BE fans are missing due to the conceptual blinkers of their fundamentally individualist models of human behaviour. Put simply, they are still stuck thinking about human behaviour in terms of individuals, their quirky cognitive make-up and (here's the new stuff) the context in which individual agents operate (which includes other people around the studied individual).

Ok, maybe not so simple.

Let's try a metaphor. I used this picture* to open that post and deliberately so:
It's something I found at the South Bank Festival of Death for the Living - a picture about loss and grieving made by individual visitors drawing circles (of whatever size) to commemorate a lost one. The only rule being to touch circles drawn by others before you.

Now, it might be interesting and useful to look at the individual participants and their individual decisions about size, location, intensity etc, but given that all participants were united by a. having lost someone dear to them b. willingness to participate, that really is unlikely to tell us much of use in understanding the whole piece (even if asking the individuals concerned would be most interesting and revealing).

Far more interesting and useful in understanding the picture and how it grows is to understand the general principles of how individuals interact with each other and what this means for the picture at scale. Think picture and pattern and not individual and motivation or perception.

Coming back to the BE debate: it's genuinely hard to think about human behaviour beyond the individual but it is really important to do so. This is (I think) what e.g. Paul Ormerod's work on the importance of networks in shaping behaviour is reaching for - albeit through the lense of the n-word.

So when we're told: "there is nothing inherently individualistic about behavioural economics. People draw on all sorts of short-cuts and rules of thumb when making decisions; from looking at what others are doing, or listening to an authority voice, to opting for the middle choice or just picking something they recognise. The concepts and frameworks inspired by BE can embrace multiple contexts and behavioural influences, both social and individual" 

...you know that it's not us missing the point.

Clearer now?

*BTW If you are the artist or you know them, please get in touch! I've tried to track you down via the Southbank but without success.

What BE's missing? Missing the point

There's an awful lot of noise around Behavioural Economics in UK marketing circles at the moment, not least in from my old colleague Crawford Hollingsworth.

Much of this is a good thing: too much of the time, we've relied on dodgy assumptions about the uman behaviour we seek to understand and/or shape. The wonderful Wendy Gordon puts it brilliantly in this series of videos.

The gap between our default assumptions about behaviour (e.g. that people are calculating machines or that they see the world cleanly and uniformly) and what e.g. behavioural economics suggests is indeed real and represents a huge opportunity for marketers, managers and policy makers.

Many of these truths seem to offer good simple insights into the kinds of problems we all struggle with. And in doing so, breathe new life into many old tools and practices, such as market research or service design. As well as bringing us closer to reality in more general terms.

But is BE the whole answer?

No. Clearly not.

But why? Well, there are those that point to the fact that BE represents a re-badging of widely published work on perception and decision-making. It's not new, in that sense - even if the re-badging has got lots of people to (re-)engage.

Others point to the very poor record in proper scientific literature of BE-led interventions actually changing behaviour. Sure, there are lots of anecdotes - popular texts are full of anecdotes (not least because anecdotes are easy to understand) but as Dr Ben Goldacre recently tweeted "the plural of anecdote is not data".[tip: when you feel overwhemled with anecdote, ask to see the peer-reviewed stuff]

No, there's something missing from BE. Something important.

I've tried to articulate why this is in the past by talking about BE as essentially a revision of traditional models of human behaviour (with added irrationality). They are part of a tradition of essentially individualist models of behaviour and ignore the fundamentally social aspects of human behaviour. In our recent book, we take a similar line, arguing that 

"humans are, first and foremost, social creatures. Yes we can be lazy thinkers, and yes, we have Pleistocene brains, but a large part of our success during the Pleistocene ans since then is attributable to our doing what we do with those around us, to learn from and influence each other so naturally that we hardly notice it"

In a recent very entertaining blog post for the Marketing Society, Crawford counters that BE does cover the social aspect of humanity but then makes our point entirely for us by only citing examples of individual-level insights. "Social" here is reduced to 'what other people say and do'.

If you needed proof of how individualist this thinking remains, then consider the key visual figure in the article. Note the individual at the heart of the concentric circles.

To be fair, Crawford's error is a common one, one embedded in those who've studied Social Psychology. As I discuss (following Farr) in HERD, the fathers of this discipline in the Anglo Saxon world (the Allport brothers) were hardline individualists.

"Social Psychology is part of the study of the individual, whose behaviour it studies in relation to that sector of his environment comprised by his fellows" [GHA]

"There is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals. . . . There is likewise no consciousness except that belonging to individuals" [GHA}

This - like so many others (including the Cabinet Office's own Mindspace report) - is a fundamental mistake.

Social is not just how an individual is influenced by others in their "behavioural landscape"; Social is about understanding human behaviour at a different scale. Our book again:

"We use the brains of others to think for us and as a place to store knowledge about the world; almost everything we know and do involves shared knowledge from past and present people - billions of them by now. To understand human behaviour, we need to move from the "me" perspective to the "we" perspective"

There are of course examples of behaviour that are best understood at the level of the individual (our book shows how to spot the patterns in data which point this up) but these cases are much rarer than most people think. Most of the time, most of us live in a world where the patterns reveal a fundamentally social world and our behaviour is best considered not in terms of the cognitive quirks or otherwise of individuals but in terms of e.g. networks and populations. Behaviour is not just - not even mostly - an individual phenomenon.

That's where it's BE is largely missing the point, as far as I'm concerned

 

 

I'll have what she's having - with John Kearon

DId this little interview a couple of weeks agowith John Kearon (Founder & Chief Juicer) at Brainjuicer, whom I managed to persuade to keep his trousers on...

Enjoy!

V for Vendetta and IHWSH

Nice piece here by the great Alan Moore here about how the film's iconic Guy Fawkes mask has got woven in to contemporary protest movements. 

Now the question is: do you think this was an example of independent choice or a socially-shaped one?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How DOES advertising work then?

For adplanners and the like:

In the pre Christmas (holidays to you, Gareth) rush, you might have missed this major U-turn by the lovely folks at Millward Brown research (the people who brought you the "awareness index" a key metric that assumes that advertising achieves its effect primarily by impacting memory - awareness and recall). 

Suddenly - after years of dissing those like my chums at Brainjuicer - who dared to suggest that emotions were the key to advertising effectiveness, the folk we used to know as The Leamington Spa Gang have turned 180 degrees. Apparently, emotion is everything or pretty much everything.

Nice to have you aboard, chaps. Will you be dumping AI scores then?

 

I'll have what she's having at the RSA

 

 

 

Oops forgot to post the RSA video of Alex and myself explaining the big ideas behind our book I'll Have What She's Having - Mapping Social Behaviour.

Here it is 

Apologies if you've seen it before - but here it is again...!

Enjoy

 

BTW here's the book itself

More on Networks from the irrepressible Mr Rheingold

This is a doosie. Not sure we'd agree with everything.

Put your feet up for 15 minutes and listen to the man. 

 

Network theory: basic errors

As regular readers will know, we're big fans of the application of network theory to understanding human behaviour - as Paul Ormerod pointed out here, the influence on our behaviour of the networks in which we live is likely to be significantly greater than any of the cognitive quirks that the psychologists and Behavioural economists are obsessed by. 

However, there are a number of common basic errors in applying network theory to human phenomenon which it's worth watching out for.

For example, I was prompted in the aftemath of Davos to re-read this piece from New Scientist about how a small number of financial institutions are much more "influential" than others over the global economy - strictly speaking they may well be hyper-connected in the period covered by the data but connected is not influential.

Potentially influential but not actually so. 

Let's be careful out there!

Seth, Santa & the mob

Nice piece from Seth Godin today (HT peter_harrison [email protected]) about the importance of...I'll have what she's having and buying "the" christmas toy:

"...there's no [longer a] mad rush for the "it" gift, the safe, coveted gift that demonstrates the giver was able to finagle a favor or brave a crush of shoppers. The notion of the one, the it, the winner, the safe choice--this is about buying without taking responsibility.

Clearly, there are as many new and wonderful things this season as there are each year, all that's missing is an anointed toy of the year. The masses want to buy what the masses have chosen as the winner, because then the purchase isn't their fault.

And that's what happens every day in just about every market, business or consumer. A few people want to take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome. But most? They just don't want it to be their fault"

Just a couple of thoughts:

i. it's not the absence of mass TV that creates a fragmented and unpredictable marketplace - TV viewing is not as dead as folk like Seth are prone to suggest (though our relationship with it has changed) - but rather the increasing number of connections we have with each other (and the opportunities to see what other folk are having).

ii. it's always interesting to examine the choice of words that people use to describe the early adopters ("take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome...") and the rest of us ("the mass...isn't their fault").

It's not just Seth, we all do it. The lionising and fetishation of early adopters - like Apple's "the crazy ones" - is something we marketers could do with having less of next year, please. It's an unhelpful bit of extrapolation from poorly misunderstood social science. Early adopters vary by market and by occasion and by context; and most of what is chosen by the cool kids never gets anywhere - the legwarmer revival anyone?

Learning from each other is core to what makes our species successful - pretending it's not and that independent choice rules the world is just wrong. And shows how blinded we are by our cultural blinkers...

Happy Christmas, nonetheless, Seth. Hope you have what I'm having... 

 

 

 

Somebody tell me what I want

Pic Herdmeister's own (from kiosk at Weybridge Station)

One of the oddest things about doing the work that I do is the reactions people have to the core idea: many of the behaviours and choices which we think we do independently turn out to be shaped by the choices of others. Looking at some car market data this week is a great example: even I was surprised to see how clearly the kind of social signatures we describe in our latest book fall out of the sales data. 

But not everyone finds it so easy to embrace the social thing. For example, I have been involved this week in a long debate on a LinkedIn BE group (I know I shouldn't) about smoking and smoking cessation - actually it's ended up being a debate about thinking and not thinking. It's striking there how some people really do feel that they are active authors of their own lives - making independent "decisions" left, right and centre, like this decisive kinda guy, maybe?

These kinds of people find it really hard to accept that their experience (or recalled experience, most commonly) of highly conscious executive decision-making is largely illusory (or even that they might be an exception to the cognitive rule): in general terms, our conscious minds are (as Kahnemann points out) more Press Office than Oval Office, more sense-maker than decision-maker. And much of the time (in our oversupplied modern world), the popularity heuristic - what she's having - seems to work just dandy; that and recency "what we did last time". 

Im sure I'll be trying IHWSH in a moment, when we head off to the pub. Somebody tell me what I want - maybe I'll just have what she's having.

Have a nice weekend, all. Wherever you are.

 

I'll Have What She's Having - implications for marketers

So now you've got the book - you have got one, haven't you? Everyone else has - and you've dipped into it a few times and maybe pondered what it says and what it means.

Here are some thoughts on what I think it means for marketers that I wrote for Market Leader, the organ of the UK's Marketing Society.

Let us know what you think - about the book and what you think the implications are....

Unilever: two and a half cheers for a purpose-led organisation

Pic c/o mccanexposure.com

Was lucky enough to be sitting in the audience for yesterday's webcast at Unilever's HQ to hear UL CEO Paul Polman (and some others) talk about their Sustainable Living plan 

As regular readers will know, we've been talking purpose here for a decade or more (as my buddy Hugh reiterated recently), long before it became popular (in churches, business schools or in blogs and coaches or consultants who have drunk the coolaid, too). For a long time, senior (aka "sensible") business folk have treated this notion as if it were for the Fancy Dans of this world - the kooky and the crazy.

So it was genuinely affecting to hear the leader of the world's second biggest advertiser talking about their social purpose as the only way to growth - not as a risk or a by-product but the thing the whole organisation has to focus on - and to see the leadership trying to work with organisations that know more about the impacts it makes on the world than it does.

You'll know - for good or ill - the Dove story as one of Unilever's previous attempts to embrace purpose, but this is genuinely something different. The level of senior engagement with this, the degree to which they've made it structurally possible to travel this way and - once more - the clarity and conviction of the leader's voice made this more than a step change. And the acknowledgement that there is a long way to travel before the real benefits are clear to all was remarkably refreshing and honest. 

I think this is a genuinely bold move and one which, whatever false steps they take (and they will take them), we should credit the corporation and its leaders with.

However, I was slightly disappointed to read the 5 levers for change document they have produced. Like so many other behaviour change manuals, it is still primarily construes behaviour as an "I thing", an individual phenomenon; still imagines that what we do to individuals is what matters in shaping their behaviour; still focuses on the "p" and not the "q" of diffusion. 

As for the calls from NGOs on the panel and in the audience - however admirable and amazing the people were - who want us to "make conscious choices", the less said the better. If our future depends on getting people to think, we're really screwed.

Looks like we still have work to do here...I'm ready.

Measuring influence

pic c/o Protein.os

This morning - in a rage at the latest Klout bollox, I stumbled over this great briefing by the Protein guys on the thorny subject on measuring influence.

Smart, pithy and concluding with words of bleedin' obvious/wisdom (delete as appropriate) from yours truly (think about it in terms of the real world first).

Enjoy!

 

6/7 cats say "independent individuals"

 

Interesting dialogue in one of the LinkedIn Behavioural Economics groups about how little (or otherwise) the BE movement has embraced the social insights.

We've talked about this here before but one of my dialogue partners has drawn my attention to the New Economics Forum equivalent of HMG's Mindspace which puts "Other people's behaviour..." as principle #1.

However...by my count, that still makes 6/7 of the "principles" about individual minds...improving the odds slightly (down from 7/8)

..just more of the same, then

I love Lucy (copying revisited)

Nice piece by Lucy Kellaway in the FT last week about our new book.

Makes the central point really clearly - copying is the mainstay of most human lives. Copying, not independent and heroic individualism, is what makes much of our world the way it is.

While the work of the Greats might on the shoulders of giants, the rest of us rely on the efforts of the ordinary Joes that surround us, too. Me and you and everyone we know (and lots of others we don't) as Miranda July's first movie had it.

Nice!

Behavioural Economics (however you spell it) and 3 times the Rory Fabulousness

Great day in Chicago today with the folks from Brainjuicer, Microsoft and Ogilvy exploring BE and marketing from lots of different angles. 

Great to see old friends, not least the Chief Juicer himself (who managed to keep his trousers/pants on all day which the link reveals is a novelty nowadays), my co-author Alex who's over here at Northwestern hanging out with the NICO guys, Carol Oman from Kraft and Graceann Bennett (who's running the Ogilvy planning thing here).

We shared some stuff from the new book which seemed to go down really well - the simplicity of the model at the heart of the book really seems to engage people. 

Couple of things struck me: first, how radically the conversation has shifted here in just a few years: when I first presented on it in the city way back in 2005-6, few folk were prepared to give it the time of day but now the BE agenda is no longer wierd and marginal; it's something worth enough for 100 execs tospend the day thinking and arguing about and examining what the insights bring to our practices and techniques. Of course, you'll find me qvetching about the fact that too much of the conversation is still around individual cognitive quirks and not enough about the social stuff that really makes the world go round, but that doesn't mean I'm not big supporter.

Second, that events like this that are gold-dust - the fact that Brainjuicer keep putting them on around the world, collaborating with different clients and creative agencies is an enormous credit to them. The events are free to attend and nobody gets paid - we're all here for the conversation and the stimulation.

Third, that one of my dreams has now been realised: we have now cloned Rory Sutherland. Not only can he exist in two timezones (a live Rorcast sufficed today)...

...as you can see, we had to blow him up to giant size in order to make the matter-transporter work (or has he just been down to the Cinnamon Club a few times recently?)

But why settle for one Rory when you can 3 supersized Rory's as here

3 times the fabulousness, indeed. 

All hail the chubby Welshmen! Nobody has done more to promote the new behavioural and cognitive sciences that our man Rory.