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.

 

 

 

 

How long should a ghostbike be allowed to hang around?

We've long collected examples of cellotaphs and ghostbikes - those popular floral tributes to the fallen that populate so many streets here in the UK and in the US.

I think they're particularly interesting social and cultural phenomena because they are examples of public-created art and monumental social artefacts (rather than stuff created by and for the great and the good for private consumption).

Today reveals an interesting problem: how long should a ghostbike be allowed to hang about?

Should it be a temporary monument? Should it be a permanent feature? Should they even be regulated? I've got my views but what do you think?

 

I copy, you copy, he/she/it copies

Source: flickr

Nice piece today in the Standard (prompted by the British Council "The English Effect" exhibition) elaborates on one of the questions we explored last summer in the run up to my School of Life Sermon: how English thrives through copying words from other tongues

Normally most of us would imagine there's some unique quality (its flexible grammar, maybe) that enables something to spread but maybe in this case is more it's ability to copy copy copy that works.

 

All ears? Outsourcing the cognitive load

Source: sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

One of the brilliant things about our super social species is our ability not just to learn from other people but to outsource the cognitive load to those around us (and those around them and out on beyond). We use the brains, the memories, the feelings, the perceptions and the know-how of others all fo the time.

Great talk yesterday at top Creative Social Sessions by Bertolt Meyer about how technology is increasingly enhancing our human nature and some of the dilemmas this introduces...

Here's a great little example of how technology is helping enhance and stretch our natural abilities. Is this a social-media enabled prosthetic?

 

Join a gang...

 

 

Really beautiful photographic archive on the New Yorker site of Bruce Davidson's Bobby's Book - a history of 1950s NYC gang, the Jokers.

Like the man said,...join a gang, any gang...

{See also my Best Piece of Advice]

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"

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)

Cycling, chimps, doping and how things spread

Pic c/o Rodebikeguy.com

Nice piece here with Dave Brailsford, the "architect" of British Cyclng success

2 interesting thoughts emerge :

1. he uses the "chimp" metaphor (like "Monkey Brain") to denote the non-human bit of ruminating consciousness which distracts us from the "flow" states that athletic performance depends on (i.e. by denigrating the human bit to animal).

2. he talks about the way doping spread through cycling but without pathologising individual dopers (quite hard given the hullabaloo surrounding it recently) or - if I understand him correctly - in blaming the thing thing.

 

 

10 years of HERD insights

So it is 10 years ago this week that I first formally presented what I called the HERD hypothesis in written form (see above) at the Market Research Society in Birmingham (for which incidentally I shared the Best New Thinking Prize). Since then - together with a number of brilliant folk - we've managed to evolve and "operationalise" the basic insight at the heart of this paper, with 2 more books, prizes from the nice people at WPP, ESOMAR and Emerald Insight along the way, a host of well-liked articles and some fascinating conversations and experiences with people I'm not sure I'd have met otherwise.

It hasn't all been plain sailing - I have endured any number of pats on the head ("interesting but not really mainstream"), some strange challenges ("OK for kids marketing & poor people - maybe abroad?") and occasionally some hostile responses ("we don't believe that monkey shit round here" being my favourite).

But gradually, over those 10 years things have changed: not least thanks to the explosion of "social media" which has made arguing for the importance of social influence in shaping human (and consumer behaviour) so much easier (praise the Lord for Mr Z for this at least). 

And collaborating with brilliant people - especially Professor Alex Bentley - to turn the analytic techniques developed across the social sciences into practical tool for marketers and decision-makers has been an unexpected but wholly positive pleasure. Back in 2007, we first developed a 4 box map based on patterns to be found in

And now 10 years on, a number of folk have picked up and recycled the work we've been doing (which is exactly how things work and spread), mostly (but not always) attributing sources. So if for example you find someone presenting one of these* over the next few days and weeks,...

 

...you'll know what to think, won't you?  

Yes, the HERD effect is at play...

Thank you all - Alex, Mike O'B, Hugh, Jason, Ray P, Gareth K, Kevin K, Kevin D, Nick K, John K, Alex B, Susan G, Tom E, Audrey, John W, Graeme W, Wendy, Angela, Sair, Mark B, Mark H, John, Fiona, Stephen, Giles, Ben, Geoff, Paul, Liz, Judie, Colin, Chris, Roddy, Peter M, Gemma, David, Bob B, Bob P, Claire, Anne & Merry.

Sorry I can't be at MRS to celebrate the 10 years anniversary but I'm sure it'll be fabulous!

*BTW the version here first developed by Alex & I in 2010 with Anomaly & Sony Europe

 

 

 

 

Related articles

Herd Instinct in the headlines

Nilsson, artists and the HERD

Memories of the future (4) You, me and everyone we know (again)

First Post: The "Herd Effect"

The anti-nudge herd

The Herd on Holiday again

Herd, Spread and Research World

What kind of thing is the Newton massacre?

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

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

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

So I wanted to make just a couple of points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Nilsson, artists and the HERD

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

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

Albert Brooks

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

 

Face to Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

And along the way there's lots to admire:

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

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

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

 

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.

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...

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.

 

Eyes down for the Copying Quiz

In advance of my Sermon on Copying and Originality at The School of Life (Sept 9th), we've put together at little quiz on copying on Facetube

Let's play along...!

More Olympics shockers

If you're not fed up with Op-Eds on what the Olympics...(sorry just fell asleep there), here's one I did for MIT press on how we learned to love...

And if you haven't had enough Boris today...

 

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.

 

Hold the dates

 

Two upcoming dates for you in the first weekend in September.

First, for music lovers we've put together a fundraising night on the 7th at the Bull & Gate (4 bands including Kevin Duncan's Fastback, the Scratch Band and our own skatastic Big Shorts), raising money for the Bolivian streetkids project we've been supporting for ages!

Do come down - it'd be great to have a packed show! More details here. 

Then on the Sunday morning...

I'm very excited to be doing one of the School of Life's Sunday Sermons on Copying and Originality BUT you'll need to sign up here as tickets are selling pretty fast.

There'll be singing (but not signing) and some jumping (but not too much) and special biscuits and maybe a visit from ol' Lucifer himself..

We've had a lot of fun putting these together so it'd be great to see you at either/both!

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]

 

Look at me...

 

Nice line in Sunday Times piece on the "mummy porn sensation" Fifty Shades of...

"It started as a dirty secret for the stuck-at-home mum, its success put down to the fact that middle-aged women could buy and read it secretly on Kindle. It has since acquired a new, younger following, who far from reading it furtively on screen, carry their paperback with the same self-conscious pride as their Cambridge satchel. What's the point of joining a craze if nobody sees you doing it?"

One of the downsides of the rise of e-readers and tablets as replacements for physical books is that it's hard to see other people's choices. In a (culture) market, flooded with alternative choices & hard to spot expertise, popularity is a key heuristic.

I wonder when the publishing industry will clock this one?

 

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

     

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.

 

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

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!

Marketoonist extraordinaire

Last week in Chicago had the good fortune to catch up again with the delightful Tom Fishburne AKA Marketoonist

Regular readers will know how much I love the wit and insight of that other marketing top toonist, Hugh Macleod but am chuffed that Tom had been led to do an I'll Have What She's Having toon since we last met down in West Wales

And lovely it is, too.

Do yourself a favour, go sign up for their regular toon mail-outs. You'll see the world differently through Tom and Hugh's eyes

 

 

 

 

 

Flowers and apples at Apple stores to mourn Jobs

Pic c/o digitalhen and BBC News

Lots of noise online today about the demise of Apple's leader Steve Jobs.

A lot of expressive socially transmitted behaviour emerging here and here.

Thanks to Joseph Kay and Tom Donald (@thepunkrockshop) for pointing out the odd tributes left at the stores: flowers, yes but half-eaten apples?

Any more examples, greatfully received...

Another Social Creature - what can we learn?

What if we were to stand outside the ideas we have about ourselves and just look at some of our evolutionary relatives? What could we see about ourselves? 

The beautiful pilot whale, for example, (like those recently struggling on the beaches of the Outer Hebrides.) 

Like us, they are individually highly intelligent (and, Pat, yes, playful)

Like us they are highly social - "entangled in each other" as David Brooks put it last week at the RSA.

And just like us, it's these social skills which are a large part of their success as a species.

And - as in humans - can lead to widespread disaster for particular populations (the "spy-bobbing" observed off Uist is not that different from human crowd panics such as described by our old friend, Dirk Helbing).

Not that special now, are we?

 

 

I vote, we vote

Pic c/o echoblog
One of the most treasured features of most modern societies is the democratic processes we use to distribute power and make decisions about the stuff that matters to us: so important are they, that we often treat democracy as the key marker for civilisation. And as we all know, a number of us have tried to take and impose the idea and the practices on other cultures.

But the practice of democracy is curiously fabricated one (not good, not bad just a cultural product). We go to extraordinary lengths to make it work: fetishizing the "secrecy of the polling booth"; controlling (in the UK, at least) election spending by candidates, banning exit (and sometimes) opinion polls during elections and sometimes (as in Australia) making voting a legal obligation, not just a right.

And yet, it's clear how often people use social heuristics to make their democratic decisions - we vote as those around us vote. In the past this has played out in terms of very tribal voting patterns in Britain and the US.

Even today - as we in Britain have voted on how we want to organised our voting - while there has been some discussion of the relative virtues of the current system and proposed alternative one, most of the noise around the debate has been in terms of "who's":

i.e. Who's backing which option? Who's going to benefit from the vote going this way or the other? Who's a vote for or against change going to hurt most?

Try as we might, we can't stop humans being social

Innovation, random drift & Isaac Newton

HT Gareth and Katy for this lovely animation of how a line drawn by 500 people one after another changes and evolves. HERD fans who've seen the live show might remember a very silly game I've used to make the same poi 
nt [about 6 minutes into this video or right at the end of this one...or after 12 or so minutes here].

Random Drift is the geneticists' term for the kind of change we observe in a population's genes which is driven by a series of neutral [i.e. small accidental] changes [one following another], rather than as the result of important changes in the environment which encouraged the selection of a particular gene over another.

The big moral is this: because we are social creatures who cannot escape the world of others in to which we are born [or indeed turn off our own tendency to copy what's going on around us]  much of what we call new or innovative is really just a miscopy of what's gone before - this despite all our efforts at being creative, original and innovative, 

Of course, you can tell yourself you are different (and gain some kudos from being seen to be so) but maybe you might just follow Isaac Newton's confession:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Is our rush to encourage and champion [deliberate or intentional] "innovation" perhaps missing the point?

 

 

 

 

Montaigne, mimicry and the mirror neurons

Nice piece in the papers by Saul Frampton a couple of weeks ago, whose book on the French philosopher and essayist Montaigne is now out.

In it, he highlights Montaigne's grasp of the roots of human empathy and mimicry:

As he [Montaigne]looks into himself he recognises his "aping and imitative character"; "whatever I contemplate, I adopt – a foolish expression, a disagreeable grimace, a ridiculous way of speaking"; "I often usurp the sensations of another person". He sees that such capacities lie behind the power of theatre: how sorrow, anger, hatred, pass though writer, actor and audience, like a chain of magnetised needles, "suspended one from the other", causing us to weep for those we care little about. For Montaigne, as for contemporary neuroscientists, humans thus have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity

Can't wait to read the book itself

Human robots = copying robots

Nice piece in this week's NS [subscription required, sorry] re robots that learn from humans in the same way that we do - by copying

using mechanisms just like our mirror neurons

The anti-nudge herd

Interesting phenomenon emerging in the last few days: a spontaneous anti-nudge herd.

First, over at the RSA there have been a number of critical blogposts (the latest of which makes the very good point that all the crowing about "nudging" is likely to undermine it's impact on real people)

Secondly, the arch humanists at Spiked have been having a repeated go at the illiberality of it all - and the condescending attitudes it reveals towards our "feckless" fellow citizens.

And then from the other end of the forest, comes the social angle as advocated by Paul Ormerod and summarised here by me).

Just remember, you heard it here first, folks

All together now

Very curious moment just now in the penultimate over of the day in the final Ashes test in Sydney (did I mention there was some cricket in Sydney?) - a moment which all sports fans and players will recognise. Here's how the Guardian OBO described it...

"66th over: Australia 208-7 (Smith 19, Siddle 17) Siddle edges Anderson's last delivery just over the slip cordon for four. That was hilarious: they all leapt in unison, even those who were nowhere near it. Even the crowd all jumped up instinctively"

Doing stuff together, well I never....

And "instinctively", too!

Matt Creamer on Influence

Insightful piece by Matt Creamer in Adage today which correctly challenges the Klout-kerfuffle about Influence in social media. 

Matt's on the money when he suggests...

Influence is not the same as popularity

Influence is not the same as fame

Influence is not the same as the nature or form of our connectedness to each other (and by the way most human social networks are not of the hub-and-spoke variety that the Influentials Hypothesis proposes).

....though each of this can help us understand aspects of influence.

So what is it?

Influence is what makes the difference between an idea or behaviour being adopted (or not) amongst those around us and those around them (and so on).

Influence is often much easier to see after the fact and harder to predict ahead of time than we imagine - as Duncan and others have repeatedly pointed out - so we shouldn't imagine that because something does or doesn't seem to be a driver of others' behaviour that it would do so if we re-played the tapes).

But it's probably best understood as something the Influenced do in response to those around them (as opposed to something the Influential do to them).We call it Social Learning or plain old Copying

Influence is not fixed for most modern human life but fluid - not least because most human life now consists not of repeated interactions with the same few poorly connected individuals (beyond our little closed tribe) but rather of this plus fleeting indirect connections to millions of others and their groups and their connections. Not to mention the fact that most choices over which we permit other folk to have an influence are between equally good, fundamentally indistinguishable options (certainly compared to the few life-or-death decisions subsistence tribes face).

So next time the clowns at Klout start wittering on about influence, stop before you let them shape your opinions...

Copy, copy, copy (again)

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

HT Simoleonsense.com

Pic c/o Getty Images via John Flood blogspot

 

 

Predicting the unpredictable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

Crossing the road together

Pic not an ad for the Beatles on iTunes at all...

Nice piece of work here which highlights the mechanism behind so much apparently suicidal behaviour on our streets.

Seems we are more likely to cross the road if someone next to us does - between 1.5 & 2.5 times.

More so for the men amongst us.

But don't worry, fellas - it's only human...

Jeremy Clarkson on the HERD

 
"Have you ever watched a vast swarm of starlings rell around the sky in Africa? Or a million-strong herd of wildebeest? If so, I'm sure you've marvelled at their ability to communicate withut actually appearing to do so. But you know what? I think human beings can do exactly the same thing"

(Sunday Times 18th July)

Really, Jeremy? And did you have that idea all by yourself? Or did it come from somebody else (like the examples you cite)? 

Nice to have you on the HERD bus, evenso. Welcome aboard.

PS Unless you have a Times online subscription (or you still have the Review section to hand), you're not going to be able to do read the full article. Blame that nice Mr Murdoch. 

Volcanos and the absence of planes

 
This Icelandic volcano lark is great, isn't it?

I don't know about you but I've found the lack of air traffic over North London very strange - combined with the unseasonably warm weather and almost non-existent breeze makes the absence of vapour trails even wierder than usual.

The grounding of almost all European flights also serves to remind us how much of our lives relies on the knowledge of others:

Until now, the simple act of airtravel hasn't required any of us to think very much - we haven't had to think through the mechanics of airtravel - the physics of it for example - we've taken it as read. Other folk must know, I presume, but not me.

Nor have many of us had to think about the practicalities in the sense of building a flying machine or flying it or where from and where to - we've again relied on other people

Nor have we had to develop an expertise atmospheric meterology - to understand when it might be safe again to take to the sky courtesy of others - no, we're relying on other people like weather forecasters and so on.

The point being is that modern life is about each of us relying on knowledge we don't have (or need to have); modern life is enabled by our ability to encode knowledge and experience in the brains of others - others often long dead; in the modern world, none of us has to know much really.

In other words, our ability to learn from others and to access what other people know is one of the things that makes us so successful. And all of this before the web came along!

Imagine if  - as other primates mostly do - you had to learn all this for your self...

Free gift: The audience and the backchannel

 

Those lovely people at Admap have let HERDfans have have free access to this piece I wrote for them about rethinking the idea of the audience for their relaunch edition!

Longstanding readers will be familiar with much of it, but hope they and the rest of you enjoy/find it useful!

Available until April 2nd!