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...
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
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)
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...
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]
Lovely feature in this month's NS which uses "Cyberball" (see above) - a game for 3 players (actually only 1 and 2 computer stooges) to explore the neuroscience of ostracism.
Yes, that's right, HERDmeister is recommending a piece of neuroscience...ring out those bells
Social neuroscience is the coming thing: it's one thing to understand the neurophysiological basis of individual responses but to understand better how our interactions with each other effect us....
Folk like Marco Iacaboni whose excellent work on mirror neurons and John Cacioppo's fab Loneliness book which traced the real physiological (including neurophsyiological) impact of chronic loneliness are among those laying a great path.
Given how important we know that social influence is and the centrality of social to the diffusion of ideas and behaviour, this seems like the beginning of something really exciting.
Watch this space...
NB AMENDED December 5th: I inadvertently elided the eminent Iacaboni and Cacioppo. Apologies to you and them.
"Motivation does not come from financial incentives alone. Again, the financial sector has done us all a disservice in promoting the belief that massive financial compensation is necessary to motivate individuals".
So writes Mervyn King, Chairman of the bank of England. about what might levers we might pull to drive up economic activity.
It's worth cutting this out and keeping it.
If you think people only do stuff for money - or even mostly do stuff for money - you'd be wrong.
There are lots of other sorts of reward and disincentives - not least is the social stuff that we go on about [people doing what other people do, for instance].
Put it this way: financial incentives presume that individuals are primarily financial optimisers, acting independently in their own interest. Paul Ormerod makes this point really well in his new book - "incentives" tend to be part of an "individualist" or "I" model of behaviour.
Some people are focused on financial incentives all the time [we call them things like "greedy mothers"], all of us can be taught to be that way [ditto] but...and there's quite lot of evidence that financial incentives can overwhelm other intrinsic motivations in certain circumstances [prosocial behaviour can actually reduce when you pay volunteers].
But - it's far from clear that financial incentives always have a positive impact in shaping behaviour in the desired direction, be it in personal health, charitable activity or criminal activity. Sometimes they actually have a negative effect [as above] becoming the reason why you continue to do something.
So if you're looking to change behaviour, please be careful with financial incentives: they don't work like they say they do [not least because we're not like they say we are] and they can actually work against the desired outcome.
Look for the other - often [pro]social - motivations.
And as we ponder our own lives, it's worth listening to wise people like Sir Ken Robinson and Hugh Macleod who remind us to focus on our passions and our talents and let the money follow those two.
Whatever it is you do, don't just do it for the money...
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.
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?
...is other people".
That's what the priest said at my mother's funeral, two years ago this week.
Today I'm off to another funeral (second one this week).
Our dear friend John Cronk died on 12th April in the Royal Marsden. Although he'd been ill for a while, it still seems like a ghastly adminstrative mistake. A real friend, through thick and thin. A genuine 'mensch' who made our lives better just by being part of them.
I'll post the professional appreciation I've done for him at a later date.= but today, just do this for me: whatever else you're worried about - lying ministers or your next big meeting or whether your trainers are the right ones - take a moment to think about the people who make your world and your life worth having.
And treasure them. Because all that matters in the end...
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