Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

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...

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.

 

 

"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?

Why be suspicious of claims made by neuro-imaging vendors

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

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

From Genes, Cells & Bones

What kind of thing is the Newton massacre?

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

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

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

So I wanted to make just a couple of points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Nilsson, artists and the HERD

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

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

Albert Brooks

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

 

Face to Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

And along the way there's lots to admire:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Habit and the HERD (I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

T'aint what they say

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

Fact: it mostly isn't.

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

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

Somebody tell me what I want

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

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

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

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

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

Have a nice weekend, all. Wherever you are.

 

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

Pic c/o mccanexposure.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earthworms, humans and social intelligence

Pic of the Monolith in Vigeland Park, Oslo

 

Nice piece here about how certain earthworm species can use social learning and generate something like social intelligence through their interactions (although it appears that touch is essential to this). Not in a scary way of course...

And this piece (HT @socialphysicist) has some interesting speculation about how we got to be more social - the shift to daylight living creating more need for shared security.

Can't help but think of the trouble so many of the folk I've spoken to recently have accepting the truth of our fundamental social nature - of course, we CAN act independently of others but mostly we don't.

 

I love Lucy (copying revisited)

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

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

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

Nice!

Behavioural economics and the "I" thing (again)

Pic via @mhallsworth and @primedecision

Interesting infographic/poster on the big strands of behavioural economics for those thinking about behaviour change.

Here's the thing: 7 of the 8 strands captured here are to do with the individals and their individual cognitive quirks.

Only 1 of the 8 (handily labelled "follow the HERD", nice) acknowledges that we are social creatures and that our behaviour is primarily shaped by other people and not our own volition.

I'm afraid you'll be hearing me say this again and again over the next few weeks as it's one of the jumping off points for our new book, I'll Have What She's Having - Mapping Social Behavior (which is out later this week). Here's what eoan made of it

 

 

 

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?

 

 

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!

Claimed vs. Actual: real and present dangers

HT @joelrubinson

Interesting example of the huge gap between what people claim to do and what folk actually do. Of course, the difference is not always so obvious or so large as it is here but some kind of difference there is likely to be.

Note also how embarrassing it can be when you take market research literally and assume that people know what they do, how they do it and that they can tell market researchers/therapists/themselves so.

Think about it next time your considering a survey or the data it generates.

Free gift: demonstration that the web isn't really built on cats but mice

 

 

The Illusion of I (revisited)

HT Sair

Of course, only you and I are individuals - the rest are sheep....