Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Big Data, not Magic Data readers offer

 

Been thinking a lot about the Big Data thing recently and a. how reminiscent it is of the CRM goldrush (follow the money, as the man said) and b. how dubious much of the thinking being trotted out - about people, organisations and measurement.

And oh, little things about how advertising and marketing actually work - a clue, it's not like this...

So here's a piece that Alex and I wrote for the upcoming issue of Admap - free download for a while!

Let me know what you think Download Big_Data_not_magic_data

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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.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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?

 

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)

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

 

 

 

 

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"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?

What kind of thing is the Newton massacre?

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

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

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

So I wanted to make just a couple of points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Nilsson, artists and the HERD

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

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

Albert Brooks

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

 

Face to Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

And along the way there's lots to admire:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Letterman Question

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

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

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

  What kind of thing is this?

Copying & Originality (School of Life Sermon)

 

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

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

 

 

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!

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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....

 

 

 

 

 

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

     

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...

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?