Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

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)

"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?

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....

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

Behaviour change & localism

Very interesting piece of research about behaviour change and the localism agenda that I stumbled on today. Download KBTLondonCouncilsFinalPUBLISH2

Those from this side of the pond will know of the sponsors - Keep Britain Tidy - and those of you from elsewhere will be able to work out what they're about.

The point being, few organisations have more experience of trying to change human behaviour (in the UK at least).

So while (if we were being picky) we could criticize the trad ask-answer research methodology at the study's heart, I think the report raises some tricky issues for those who assume that just pushing decision making down to the local community is going to work and make things better. For example:

things that drive dissatisfaction don't necessarily drive satisfaction (e.g. street cleanliness)

But perhaps most importantly, our views as citizens on what's important are not necessarily in line with the science (althought respondents' scepticism about Nudging might not be so misplaced...)

 

Nudge nudge wink wink: more criticism

Pic c/o etsy

Another week, another HMGovernment policy paper awash with nudging and nudges [HT Bob Pickett]

Nice piece here which highlights some important criticisms of Nudge and nudging [raised in this BMJ article] by a number of leading academic authorities on health-related behaviour change (including Prof Theresa Marteau, whom I had the good fortune to meet last year).

Here's the first para of the the BMJ piece's conclusions:

"Nudge and similar recent popular texts have stimulated policymakers to think about altering environments to change behaviour. These developments are to be welcomed. Evidence to support the effectiveness of nudging as a means to improve population health and reduce health inequalities is, however, weak. This reflects absence of evidence as well as evidence of little or no effect..." [my italics]

Part of the reason cited in the BMJ for the weakness of nudging as a frame for behaviour change tool is the fact [as suggested here previously] that largely ignores the social world in which we live  and insists on considering individual behaviour as the appropriate level of granulation to think about human behaviour (the other big argument here is that the light-touch interventions that nudge tends to favour tend to skip around doing the politically difficult and often unpopular context-changing things like introducing smoking bans yet at the same time ignoring the competitive nudges e.g. what beer marketers use to steal the virtuous away...)

And - so you don't go away with the impression that this is the scientific equivalent of a local neighbourhood quarrel - the interview rightly highlights the underlying attraction of  cheap and the simple fixes, which much nudging seems to offer policy makers 

 “This is why this idea has caught on, because it’s selling a very attractive [cheap and easy] proposition...It’s a political philosophy rather than behavioral science”

Political philosophy rather than behavioral science, indeed.