Source: NIH
Very bad news today re the re-emergence of previously suppressed serious childhood diseases like measles in the UK - thanks to the middle-class mums who choose to ignore scientific evidence and listen instead to anecdote and speculation.
MMR is by any measure an extremely safe vaccine, not the toxin blamed by the discredited Andrew Wakefiled and the rumour mill.
This is a case when we're all in it together - "herd immunity"
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...
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)
Pic c/o Bitter Waller
BBC have gone ape with an interesting primatology study today: when chimps and infant humans play the Ultimatum game (widely used by economists to determine real world notions of fairness and equity), both species seem to exhibit similar patterns of behaviour and thus - it is suggested - similar notions of fairness.
While the study does point to similarities, it's worth bearing in mind that what seems to be "normal" human responses often conceals wide cultural variation. Canadian anthropologist Joseph Henrich has repeatedly shown this is so, in bothering to play this kind of game with folk other than Western
Lamalera Whale hunters for example, who depend on each other much more than, say, Kalahari bushmen, tend to make much bigger offers than the norm.
Not that games are wrong - far from it, they're often really useful mode to explore behaviour and embedded attitudes and dispositions- it's just that if we're not careful, we can mistake local variation for generalised truth and - as in this case - genetically-hard wired truths for culturally-shaped ones (and yes, other primates have culture, too)
Been pondering recently how and why (and just the surprise of) science becoming a mainstream cultural phenomenon.
Not just the CERN Hadron Collider (much of the tabloid conversation around which was more Sci-fi than science, more crazy physics professors trying to destroy the structure of reality...etc etc)
But also the more general excitement and enthusiasm around science and science-based content - BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, the irrepressible Prof Brian Cox's Astronomy shows and Dara O Briain's Science club
Some of this is clearly to do with the rise of the geek as a cultural identity, some of it a reaction to the terrible wibbly wobbly irrationality and superstition of the vaccine refusniks, homeopathy proseltysers and the religious fundamentalists.
But let's be honest, little of it has anything to do with actual rational & independent choice.
Most of this - as yesterday's post about Alex & Mike's NYT piece suggested - is likely shaped by people copying each other, not by them making rational decisions based on the evidence. That said, it's a welcome development given the times.
How strongly this shift in attention to science and scientific work compares with the "personal opinions" on abortion and premature birth survival rates that certain UK ministers have expressed (which are clearly contradicted by the evidence).
And in our own part of the forest, with the over claimed certainties and inappropriate precision of so many vendors of what some call "neurononsense", "neuromania" or just plain "brain porn" (aka Neuromarketing).
How delightful then to watch Prof Uta Frith and other neuroscientists on the latest episode of Dara's show (particualry Frith) with their humour, humility and honesty remind us that we're really on at the beginning of understanding how individual brain activity relates to behaviour.
As my old headmaster would say, "mark and note".
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.
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.
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!
Really lovely piece in London's Evening Standard today on the importance of science as a way of learning and understanding the world - prompted clearly by the extraordinary work done at CERN and elsewhere to discover the Higgs-Boson particle.
Couple of thoughts:
First, science isn't primarily an individual activity. Of course, individuals are involved (and those that get lucky get to have stuff named after them and have stories told about their heroic efforts).
Most scientific research is a team game in two or three really important ways: in experimental science most studies are carried out with other people and in analytic and theoretical science most papers are jointly authored.
Equally, scientific breakthroughs don't tend to come out of the blue - the product of crazed loners or isolated teams. Most modern scientists are part of a larger conversation - that's what e.g. journals and conferences are about.
And of course, the point about the scientific method as opposed to other non-fiction research is that the measurement (and thus the findings) should be replicable by those other than the key authors (otherwise the findings are of little use). Or as Popper suggested, open to falsifiability.
Not forgetting Newton's famous "On the shoulders of giants" dictum: each generation's breakthrough work harnesses the work of many previous studies - often of people long dead.
All of which is curiously designed to stop the individual scientist or research team merely following the accounts of respected authorities (as ancient and medieval science was prone to) - another different social kind of thing.
So when the Standard sub-editor choose to stick the headline "The hunt for Higgs boson shows what our wonderful minds can achieve" don't be mislead: the author's not talking about neurononsense and what the individual human brain is capable of.
Rather he's referring to what our minds are capable of when they're harnessed together (albeit in very strict ways).
Nonetheless, like the man says.
"the bigger point is that it is the most effective way we have to answer some of the biggest questions of all. Science should be cherished for that alone. This great human endeavour has given us the most grand and compelling glimpse of the universe. Enjoy the view."
Am feeling for Jonah Lehrer this weekend, following Steven Poole's review of his latest book, Imagine - How Creativity Work in the Guardian. I've met Jonah a couple of times and read his work frequently and - as is often the case - feel for the real person I've construed in my head.
Unflattering reviews are never pleasant to receive (I've had a few in my time and much as I'd like to pretend they don't hurt, they genuinely do) but at the heart of this one is a critique that I have a lot of sympathy with, if it's true - namely Imagine's overwhelming neuroscientism.
"...(The term has been employed by the philosopher Colin McGinn and the critical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, among others.) Scientism is the confidence that science can explain all aspects of human life; neuroscientism is the more specific promise that brain-scans (using the limited current technologies of fMRI and EEG) can explain the workings of the mind"
In recent posts, I've talked about neurocartography and brain-porn: others - such as the ineffable David Penn - have used the term neuromania. All of us share a concern at the very reductionist approach that sees brain activity (and groovy pictures of brains in action - which btw are reconstructed as-if they were based on a clear view of what goes on inside the skull rather than being a reconstruction of readings of changes in the electro-magnetic field in different parts of the brain) as essentially the "truth" about mind and decision-making; a rhetoric that defaults to the synaptic without further thought.
Some - like Poole? - primarily resist the reduction of the mental and cultural to the physiology of the grey matter between our ears on the grounds that these phenomena are much richer than these pictures - this brain porn - suggest. A fair point, you might think, given the relative youth of neuroscience as a discipline - we're far from the claimed precision in understanding the functionality, let alone from understanding the relationship between specific brain activity and specific action.
Me, I have another - additional - problem with looking to the individual brain for answers: most human life is lived in the company and under the influence of others - looking between the ears of an individual is only going to get you so far in understanding our fundamentally socially-shaped behaviour. It's just the wrong place to look for much beyond general principles - however well one reads the literature.
And - let's be clear - our biology is only part of our evolutionary success: for sure, it's our biology that has enabled us to develop, share and exploit culture but that culture itself is the same thing as our biology. Focusing on the biological roots - as if they are the ultimate grounding - seems to me myopic at best.
Trying to understand human behaviour through the lens of individual brain activity in the lab is like understanding dolphin behaviour by dragging individuals away from the pod and out of the water: it tells you somethings but misses the key contextual pieces.
PS The notion so widely trumpeted in support of what I'm sure is a very enjoyable book - that we are all creative - also found its way into the heart of a tome call Welcome To The Creative Age (which I published a decade ago)...and I certainly wasn't the first to suggest it!
UPDATE: John points out the fascinating debate (including Jonah's comments) around this post
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.
One of the ideas that most hinders our attempts to get to grips with human behaviour is that which sees the individual agents and not the ecosystem; the consumer (nuff said on that one) and not the social world which individuals live and which they help create.
Much of cognitive psychology (and it's fair to say, much of the Nudge-gang's work) remains rooted in understanding the quirks of individuals' cognitive machinery; much of evolutionary psychology seems to be stuck in explaining the behaviour of individuals devoid of their real context - that is, other people. And in popular culture, we tend to go back to specifics (to excessive nodality as the network theorists would put it): to the specific individual and what causes or might shape that person's behaviour. This is as true of our political debates as it is of our personal lives.
But that's not what human life is like: it's not individuals, living in splendid isolation (except for those exceptional examples, such as the saints depicted above); for us social creatures, life IS other people (even if we find it hard to see it as such for our own lives).
Couple of things to think on:
First, this lovely study that shows how fir trees create networks for themselves and interact within them. Trees? Yes, trees.
Second, this fabulous book by Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield which I've been savouring which explores how high levels of co-operation emerge naturally in human populatons (and how Nowak has explored the subject).
Third, a thought from the priest who buried my late mother. "in the end all that matters - all that has ever mattered - is the people".
As a culture, we tend to be disdainful of this line of thinking. We tend to try to squeeze the individual agent back in but in doing so we rob ourselves of the really important insights into human behaviour.
"Most lives are a quotation from the lives of others" suggested Oscar Wilde. He meant it in a bad way but it turns out he's right about the fact, wrong about the significance of it.
Once you've understood this mechanic - the central point of our upcoming book - then please try to look beyond your "nodal" filter to the system which it creates.
Try to see the woods for the trees, if you like.
So today NASA's manned space flight programme essentially comes to a close as the last Shuttle lands.
For my generation, this is a noteworthy beat in the long and exciting story of the Space Age.
You see, before I was 10 we swatched this live - the first time in our species entire history that a human being landed on the moon!
And this dramatic moment (which you might know better from the movie reconstruction)
Our schoolyard games and our dreams were full of the wonder of space travel - of new planets, and new horizons.
The space age shaped all kinds of things we now take for granted - for example, the image of our little planet as seen from space kick-started the conservation movement (or awareness of the need for one) for many of us.
So today seems wierd, like we've missed out on something special. Something we're never going to get back. And that just leaves me feeling a little sad - quite a lot, actually.
I'm with Mr William Bloke
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the Moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel that we've all grown up too soon
Listen here to the full song here or here (for better picture).
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?
Very excited about an upcoming gig in June c/o my lovely friends at The School of Life
I'm leading a trip to London Zoo (accompanied by my chum and collaborator, Dr Alex Bentley whose deputy director of the fabulous Tipping Points project)
We'll be using our knowledge and insight into animal behaviour to help illuminate some important stuff about ourselves as human animals (or super social apes).Both at the Zoo and then - later - in the jungle that is Camden Lock.
Come prepared for adventure!
Pic c/o Ancrack.co.uk
Caught up with last week's New Scientist yesterday and was struck by the relevance of the lead editorial's challenge to scientists about how their data is used (not just what it is, how clean it is or how it is obtained)
It is tempting to lay the blame solely at the feet of ignorant politicians or an irresponsible media. They do indeed play a significant role, often perpetuating mistakes, muddles and misunderstandings.
But journalists and policymakers can only work with what they are given. Scientists need to bear in mind how their statistics can be abused - or perhaps unintentionally read the wrong way.
The same point is equally valid for market researchers (as an old paper of mine suggested) or anyone who's creating information for other people inside or outside their organisation.
It's not an either/or: you've got to make sure your data is sound and clean but you've also got to recognise that it's what they do with it that matters (and they will do stuff with it if it it is to spread).
Data is never just data - it will have a human social context if it is to go beyond your desktop. So design the human in, please.
Top ten social-science questions according to the journal Nature (HT Alex)
1. How can we induce people to look after their health?
2. How do societies create effective and resilient institutions, such as governments?
3. How can humanity increase its collective wisdom?
4. How do we reduce the ‘skill gap’ between black and white people in America?
5. How can we aggregate information possessed by individuals to make the best decisions?
6. How can we understand the human capacity to create and articulate knowledge?
7. Why do so many female workers still earn less than male workers?
8. How and why does the ‘social’ become ‘biological’?
9. How can we be robust against ‘black swans’ — rare events that have extreme consequences?
10. Why do social processes, in particular civil violence, either persist over time or suddenly change?
We're working on a number of these issues, directly or indirectly. What about you? Are you increasing the body of knowledge and how? And if not, why not?
Nice piece in the papers by Saul Frampton a couple of weeks ago, whose book on the French philosopher and essayist Montaigne is now out.
In it, he highlights Montaigne's grasp of the roots of human empathy and mimicry:
As he [Montaigne]looks into himself he recognises his "aping and imitative character"; "whatever I contemplate, I adopt – a foolish expression, a disagreeable grimace, a ridiculous way of speaking"; "I often usurp the sensations of another person". He sees that such capacities lie behind the power of theatre: how sorrow, anger, hatred, pass though writer, actor and audience, like a chain of magnetised needles, "suspended one from the other", causing us to weep for those we care little about. For Montaigne, as for contemporary neuroscientists, humans thus have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity
Can't wait to read the book itself
Nice piece in this week's NS [subscription required, sorry] re robots that learn from humans in the same way that we do - by copying
using mechanisms just like our mirror neurons
From this week's New Yorker: HT @hitsamty
"Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people"
Interesting study suggesting that the way we copy each other in our interactions shapes our ability to understand each other's speech and thus improves our social interaction.
HT Simoleonsense.com
pic c/o thisweekfordinner
Interesting Big Society headline-grabber from Windsor and Maidenhead council today (via Westminster one suspects) about incentivising pro-social behaviour.
While lauding the experimentation mindset being demonstrated, can I just suggest a. that we have a read of the literature (mixing economic and prosocial motivations doesn't have a good track record) before we leap on the bandwagon b. we insist on something better in terms of test design than the "fish oil farago" of a while back
That's all for now, folks
The Economist piece on the PNAS paper by Onnela and Reed-Tschochas seems to have further stimulated just the kind of cascade of interest among business readers this week that the study at its hear actually describes. I keep tripping over pieces online and off.
If you haven't read it you should - some interesting new angles on social influence (and a magic number - 55!).
Any article abstract that starts like this, deserves your attention
"Social influence drives both offline and online human behavior. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices"
But what I really love is the way the Economist readership go overboard a. to deny they use social learning [the Economist being after all the ultimate enlightment organ of independent thought] and b. disparage it using animal metaphors. One after another....
FREE GIFT: the infamous Disney "White Wilderness" movie which created the myth of "lemming-like" self-destruction
Pic c/o Scienceblogs.com
Regular readers will know I've long championed the new insights into human beings that we've come to know as Behavioral Economics. Indeed, you could suggest that my mission has been to challenge the received wisdom about human behaviour - to unpick the assumptions embedded in our practices in marketing, management and public policy.
For example, back in 2005 I wrote a paper (anyone got a copy?) which discussed - at some length - the cluster of cognitive biases which together make up much of BE's armoury (see this Cabinet Office paper for a full description Download MINDSPACE-full).
Again and again, In various contexts, I've returned repeatedly to the practical argument for BE - the real difficulties in bringing about actual behavior change (from the original HERD paper to the various iterations of the thinking) and the need to bring cognitive and behavioural science to bear on how we think about it. And of course, I've been a big supporter of both the IPA's BE initiative and the RSA's Social Brain project which deals with much the same set of issues. And I'm delighted that politicians and policy makers of all hues are embracing it.
But I'm beginning to think that maybe the success of BE is making us feel complacent. Maybe it's stopping us really pressing on.
Think of it this way:
Behavioural Economics is a response - a step on - from the old rational agent model of human behaviour. It conceptualises humans not as rational agents who accurately perceive the world around them and act appropriately but as faulty agents, with lazy minds (as Kahnemann puts it) - with built-in quirks and biases in our perceptional machinery.
But - and here's the big thing - it still views humans as at heart independent agents; human behaviour as grounded fundamentally at the level of individuals.
Of course, BE represents a big improvement on the old model and we'd all do well to get a grip on the insights it offers and I can see how much easier it is to slip from rational agent models to the kind of faulty agent models implied by BE...but let's be honest: it's only half way to a proper rethink.
The real breakthrough is likely to come from starting to conceptualie humans and human behaviour as fundamentally social (not individual).
Try this: is thinking an individual or social function?
Intrigued by the headlines of this research which suggests that collective "flow" activities are even more valued than individual ones. Singing, team games etc...
Not news to me, but I guess, this will be a surprise to those who think our curiously hairless species is something other than a Super Social Ape!
PS Can anyone send me a copy of the paper?
Nice musings by chum David C and Stowe Boyd around this study that suggests it's the not the number of connections you have that determines your influence, but rather the nature of those connections - your "betweenness" as Stowe calls it:
"It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses." [SB]
But David makes this important point:
"Influence is fluid. It resides less in the node and more in the interactions between the nodes. It is the interactions which change the state of the group, not a change in the condition of the nodes (think water H2O molecules and ice, water, steam...
...This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence others with"
Which prompts my sixpenceworth:
Influence is not something done by certain people to other people (as for example the pic above from New Scientist might suggest) it's the result of those people we call The Influenced doing something in response to those we call Influential.
As Duncan Watts and Matt Salganik noted in their important music-download paper, it's more about the readiness of a population to adopt a behaviour than the behaviour of specific individuals.
I.e. The Influenced do the heavy lifting of Influence, not the Influentials - and the fact that Influence is often mutual i.e. we all (well-connected or not) take cues from each other - that's one important reason why the search for the Influentials is so prone to misunderstanding and dead-ends.
As soon as we grasp this, going about understanding and harnessing influence begins to be a little more sensible...
Yesterday, my old chum David C pointed a bunch of folk like me to this piece in Adage by Steve Knox, the guy who runs Tremor - the P&G WoM/sampling outfit.
Now, first of all let me say the two central points of the piece seem unobjectionable:
1. the idea of disrupting shared assumptions in a marketplace by what you do and how you say has been around in various forms (not least Jean-Marie Dru's masterpiece Disruption) for nearly 2 decades now. If you haven't come across it til now, I'd suggest you check your feeds (and the calendar)
2. It's good to root our theory in contemporary science. Again, the idea behind schema - whatever you call them - is not exactly news - even to the determinedly ignorant of science.
But,.....[yes, I know, I'm always qualifying positive commentary]
....what is it that I feel uncomfortable about in the case that Knox makes?
Well, I think I've got two areas of concern:
First, it does seem a rather selective reading of cognitive science - a post-rationalisation, even, to justify what the company does post-hoc - a bit of scientific sticking plaster to shore up the intellectual credentials of a business that has shifted around between sampling, testing and advocacy objectives. Starting with the business practice rather than the science.
Specifically, and probably most importantly, is what I see as a lazy assumption that WoM - what people say to their peers - is what shapes their behaviour; when it's what we see others do and whether or not we choose to follow them.
As Grant and I and Faris have all made clear a number of times, most human speech is - as you'd expect from a social creature - phatic - that is more to do with the inter-relationships between speaker and listener than about any specific content. Most human speech and communication (in the traditional sense of words and thoughts) is content-lite and people-heavy. It's really cheap.
Even if you take a more enlightened view of influence and see influence as more a pull- than a push-phenomenon, it's far from clear how WoM is going to be a major force of behaviour. Sure, we can read excitement or despair into each other's talk and writing but this is not the same as our behaviour being shaped by the content of what other people say (except in extreme circumstances, like a Fire!).
Bit more science, Mr Knox, and a bit less assumption, maybe?
Saw this (above) lovely piece of detective work today on Buzzfeed (they picked it from giagantor who picked it up from...) about - well, let's call it the "Keep Calm Meme" (if your not a Brit or connected to Brits you might have to go check the links now to explain it. Good. Welcome back).
What the visuals (plus the comments on on the Buzzfeed page) seem to show is the history of how one little known WWII poster design spread and evolved over a short period of time (I've got a t-shirtGod, even my Dad has a mug with it on). Brilliant. Like the map of a "meme", it's suggested.
But...but, but, but...!
It's very easy to imagine that it must be something about the original design or the concept or the style of illustration that made it spread so wide (we talk of Stickiness in Marketingland or Fitness if we've got our evolutionary hat on) - something about the Keep Calm line that has an abiding appeal, something that plays to our nostalgic sense of duty or whatever. Or maybe something just plain different.
Unfortunately, this isn't a good default setting/working assumption: more often than not with the stuff of popular culture, the thing itself isn't that important in determining how far (or not) something spreads. On the one hand, most of our choices aren't that different from each other - it doesn't really matter which one we choose - and on the other hand, focussing on the successful item distracts us from the absence of the ones which didn't make it (which will often turn out to be indistinguishable from the winner). It turns out that many successful "memes" have only one characteristic that their unsuccessful competitors didn't have: luck...!
This has much broader applications than reading popular culture or a market's history. Looking back, we're all too ready to look to the thing to explain how something spreads and - following the 7 Lesssons of Successful People syndrome - use it as a template for success. Or an unhelpful straightjacket...when all the time it may just be chance that creates success.
Indeed, one of the things, I'm working on right now is a simple way to tell the difference between something that has chance and luck to thank for its success and something which has something about itself to thank.
So next time you see something that's become popular - something that seems to fall into this "meme" category of items - why don't you try calling it "something that turns out to have been successful but might just be lucky but we don't know either way yet"?
PS What's your fave "Don't Panic"? I'm with Matt Jones' "Get Excited...". You?
Short piece in yesterday's Sunday Times trailling some upcoming work by the great Robin Dunbar that seems worth keeping an eye open for:
"We may be able to amass 5,000 friends on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 friendships, a study has found.
Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history"
If he's right - and it seems plausible - then it's worth being careful with what we call these SM connections. "Friends"? Or "Connections"?
And reminding ourselves that while technology is incredibly powerful, it's the human stuff that tends to win out.
Pic c/o Scienceblog
A conversation last night with my new client (very late indeed even by Spanish standards) and a prompt from my chum Johnnie today (go here for Derren Brown's note on self-control and influence) brought this idea into focus again:
it's all to easy for us to get distracted by character of the things we make - by their stickiness and the contagiousness - and imagine that it's these kind of qualities (and thus ultimately our efforts) that determines the success of the things (i.e. how far and fast they spread through a given population).
While that is true in some cases - and it's not completely irrelevant in most (terrible products don't tend to win) - assuming it as a default setting, merely encourages you & me to ignore the underlying mechanism by which the things themselves spread: that is, through people.
And in particular largely through people following ("pulling") what others around them are doing (and not as is all-too-often suggested (e.g. by the diagram at the top of this page or this famous one)
Two obvious reasons why we tend to go this way: 1. it plays to what we want to believe about ourselves as masters of persuasion and manipulation of the masses 2. it helps us avoid all that messy human stuff that can so bog brilliance down & (last but not least) 3. because everyone else does it, too.
The future of marketing and related disciplines is really about getting better at the people stuff and embracing the messiness of it and our lack of real control over the outcomes.
I really enjoy the debates that people have (with me and with each other) around the keynotes that I'm asked to give. I remember with particular fondness being told back halfway through the decade by one rather puffed-up marketing exec (as I recall, from the Blue Monster!) that all this social influence stuff is interesting but not that important as ultimately it is always an individual who does the buying - why bother particularly if technology was going to help us find and target them precisely?
2009 was the year that that this finally got to sound silly to most ears (not just signed up members of the HERD club).
And - no coincidence - it was also the year that 3 really important books got published on the science behind all this:
First, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's extraordinary Mothers and Others which suggests that the origins of our incredible social nature lies in the shared child-rearing habits (alloparenting) of our ancestors, rather than the more masculine "machiavelli" hypothesis (i.e. in order to gain social power and status).
[Watch her at the RSA here]
Secon, John Caccioppa's fantastic social neuroscience study of Loneliness which suggests that loneliness is an aversive adaptation - like pain - which if not acted on has real physical effects on our all-too-social selves.
[See John at the RSA here]
And finally, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's brilliant Connected which pulls together a really insightful review of what connectedness means - at the heart of which is their analysis of the famous Framingham longitudinal health study (not just a large sample but one which records social connectedness not just health indicators)
[Here they are at (hey hey!) Microsoft labs...reminding us that online social networks are a very recent version of much older phenomena]
I'm not sure I can pick a winner for you out of these three (you should read all of them) but I know that work about the science of social (even work of this quality and coherence) would not have found the mainstream audience it now commands just a few years ago.
What cheers me is that in many spheres of human life - politics, medicine , social policy, management & of course, marketing - it's no longer a question of maybe for the whole "HERD" Social hypothesis; it's a given (even if we're still only just beginning to work through the implications Download BrainJuicer Paper - Me-to-We Research).
There's one thing you can count on going forward - there's no going back. It's us - you,me & everyone we know.
I won't say that I told you so, but...
Regular readers will know that a lot of the drive behind my work and my writing over the last decade has been the flood of insights about human beings & human behaviour that - over the last 10 years - the behavioural and cognitive sciences have unleashed. In fact, you might say, reading and making sense of the science has shaped
Far from being a marginal - oddball, even - pursuit, this is fast becoming mainstream and will continue to grow apace this year.
From the IPA's Behavioural Economics Initiative to COI's Common Good Research on Behaviour Change the newly-published RSA Social Brain Project - all of which I've found myself involved in shaping.
Many of our most strongly-held common-sense ideas about humans and human behaviour are challenged by the work aggregated and synthesised in these kind of proejcts: like (as we HERDies like to remind folk) the Anglo-Saxon assumption that we are a species of self-determining individuals or the related one that thought shapes behaviour...
Of course, this is not just a liberation (and a step towards universal enlightenment) but it also offers the potential for the kind of one-eyed pick-and-mix applications of science that previously characterised things like "neuromarketing".
BIG PROPS to both the IPA and it President Rory Sutherland for two big initiatives in recent weeks which show a previously staid, establishment organisation taking big steps into the present.
First, the IPA social initiative (which I've discussed here before) which a. acknowledged a problem with their previous attempts to engage with the issue b. opened itself up to the community to provide a correction c. embraced the recommendations of the community to engage in d. a conversational format for the session.
While Rory wasn't directly involved here, his presence elsewhere is one of the reasons why Nigel, Patrick, Pippa, Felicity and co all felt able to go in the direction we pointed them (more on this anon, btw).
Then, yesterday I attended the public reveal of Rory's big Behavioural Economics initiative at the RSA. The fabulous Matt Grist talked about the Social Brain Project we've been working on, the brilliant Nick Chater revealed some of his great work on decision-making and the lovely Nick Southgate did a great piece on beginning to work out some of the implications for adfolk of these new insights into human behaviour.
For me, this is a landmark initiative, a public recognition that the embedded models of human behaviour in the industry's practices are not the be-all and end-all; that might even be wrong...and that we need to do something about them, pronto
Regular readers will know that I've long championed the science that points to other models than either rational choice or the standard social science ones which have dominated our thinking for generations - indeed, that's really the HERD gig, tbh. To turn this into action, they've set up a series of seminars/training events next month for different disciplines in IPA member agencies.
The IPA & their self-proclaimed Chubby Welshman are on the move. Well done both.
So here's Rory and his lookilikee for you (or is it the other way round?)
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