Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

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.

 

 

"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?

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...

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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...

 

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.

 

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

     

Typical explanations of mass behaviour

 

 

Typical piece today in WSJ seeking to explain the mass phenomenon of Biebermania via neuroscience.

Typical inappropriate: mass phenomena really are not best explained by micro descriptions (as we've consistently argued).

Unless of course, all of these kids really are deciding independently on their behaviour (which the "mania" & "hysteria" tags point away from - all very I'll Have What She's Having, I suspect)

And typically lazy: neuroporn/neurononsense is just today's source of faux insight - "sciency" without having to think too hard.

Come on, will you WSJ? Try just a little bit harder, please...

Decision making landscape - towards a better map

 

In a recent post about what BE is missing, I referred to this Crawford chart that I feel captures the individualist model clearly: it places individuals - like a Ptolemaic Earth - at the heart of things.

The alternative is not a Copernican one - shifting the focus from one planet/individual to another while retaining the structure of concentric circles around the focal point.

No, a better conceptual map would be more like this: a repeated pattern of Crawford's individual circles or a series of interacting individual balls:

And most importantly of all, a dynamic pattern - one that is changing all the time (which leads to this kind of thing - a dynamic fitness landscape).

So two really big lessons here: 1. most humans live most of their life responding to the ideas, feelings and behaviour of those around them 2. those others are not fixed but in flux because they (too) are responding to those around them.

That's what leads to this kind of real or robot flocking and shoaling behaviour. The smooth running interspersed with sudden and rapid changes in direction are the result of this dynamic interaction.

BE can't begin to describe this level of complexity - which lies at the heart of social worlds -  because of the central failure to get beyond the individualist perspective.

Admittedly, it's hard to conceptualise this dynamic supra-individual alternative - our cognitive gifts seem much better suited to the individualist models - but that doesn't make it wrong to try. And we could do with a bit more trying here, I reckon.

 

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

Neuroscientism and neuroporn (updated)

Am feeling for Jonah Lehrer this weekend, following Steven Poole's review of his latest book, Imagine - How Creativity Work in the Guardian. I've met Jonah a couple of times and read his work frequently and - as is often the case - feel for the real person I've construed in my head.

Unflattering reviews are never pleasant to receive (I've had a few in my time and much as I'd like to pretend they don't hurt, they genuinely do) but at the heart of this one is a critique that I have a lot of sympathy with, if it's true - namely Imagine's overwhelming neuroscientism.

"...(The term has been employed by the philosopher Colin McGinn and the critical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, among others.) Scientism is the confidence that science can explain all aspects of human life; neuroscientism is the more specific promise that brain-scans (using the limited current technologies of fMRI and EEG) can explain the workings of the mind"

In recent posts, I've talked about neurocartography and brain-porn: others - such as the ineffable David Penn - have used the term neuromania. All of us share a concern at the very reductionist approach that sees brain activity (and groovy pictures of brains in action - which btw are reconstructed as-if they were based on a clear view of what goes on inside the skull rather than being a reconstruction of readings of changes in the electro-magnetic field in different parts of the brain) as essentially the "truth" about mind and decision-making; a rhetoric that defaults to the synaptic without further thought.

Some - like Poole? - primarily resist the reduction of the mental and cultural to the physiology of the grey matter between our ears on the grounds that these phenomena are much richer than these pictures - this brain porn - suggest. A fair point, you might think, given the relative youth of neuroscience as a discipline - we're far from the claimed precision in understanding the functionality, let alone from understanding the relationship between specific brain activity and specific action.

Me, I have another - additional - problem with looking to the individual brain for answers: most human life is lived in the company and under the influence of others - looking between the ears of an individual is only going to get you so far in understanding our fundamentally socially-shaped behaviour. It's just the wrong place to look for much beyond general principles - however well one reads the literature.

And - let's be clear - our biology is only part of our evolutionary success: for sure, it's our biology that has enabled us to develop, share and exploit culture but that culture itself is the same thing as our biology. Focusing on the biological roots - as if they are the ultimate grounding - seems to me myopic at best.

Trying to understand human behaviour through the lens of individual brain activity in the lab is like understanding dolphin behaviour by dragging individuals away from the pod and out of the water: it tells you somethings but misses the key contextual pieces.

PS The notion so widely trumpeted in support of what I'm sure is a very enjoyable book - that we are all creative - also found its way into the heart of a tome call Welcome To The Creative Age (which I published a decade ago)...and I certainly wasn't the first to suggest it!

UPDATE: John points out the fascinating debate (including Jonah's comments) around this post

Habit and the HERD (I)

Am ploughing my way through Charles Duhigg's new book on Habits at the moment and - the basic point about habits and our tendency default to low-level cognitive activity aside - am finding it all rather disappointingly and over familiar territory. 

Not just in terms of the overkill of neuro-cartography ("we know that this is important because there's something going on in the brain here...") but in terms of the ideas of habits being shaped by rewards and repetition (in what way is this not classical conditioning?).

Add to that the lionising of dead Mad Men and their supposed magical abilities to change habits among the larger population (highly overstated, as it happens).

And let's be honest, the relentless invididualist & materialist perspective: presenting human behaviour as the product of fundamentally isolated individuals and their biology....

I've been promised that it gets better later - as Neil spotted:

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

Now, that's more like it. I'm hoping we get there sooner rather than later.

 

 

 

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.

Neurononsense revisited: a new dawn?

Last night at a reception in memory of the late and great Ginny Valentine, an old buddy of mine asked me what I thought about the proliferation of neuromarketing techniques and the general air of "brain is best" in market research communities.

Perhaps I should have just referred him to David Penn of Conquest who is delighting in being the continuing scourge of snake-oil neuro-research sales persons: his "neuromania" schtick is coming to the MRS in March. Always good value.

Regular readers will know that - like David - I'm deeply suspicious of the willing misrepresentation of the science - of what is currently understood about brain activity and its relationship with behaviour (for example here and here)

Sure, we've got some general principles in place, we've far from the precise, mechanical descriptions that many vendors suggest.

What's more the reality of most human life - and most consumer choices - is social (whether or not the choice is made in the company of others): in much of modern life, we defer to the choices and enthusiasms of others. Trying to predict the behaviour of an isolated individual from the activity in his/her brain is missing the key variable shaping that choice.

Our brains are not - as we tend to think - just independent decision-making muscle - but rather evolved specifically as social organs (as Dunbar and Humphrey  long ago demonstrated - you might remember this more recent paper, too)

This is why this kind of research is so interesting: it explores the neuroscience of social interaction. Dare I suggest put neuromarketing on hold until the academics have got to grips with these - rather more important - factors in influencing behaviour?

 

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!