Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

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.

 

 

Join a gang...

 

 

Really beautiful photographic archive on the New Yorker site of Bruce Davidson's Bobby's Book - a history of 1950s NYC gang, the Jokers.

Like the man said,...join a gang, any gang...

{See also my Best Piece of Advice]

Social spread of prosocial behaviours

Source: Studioportraits.eu

Nice example here of an experiment which supports kinds of social diffusion of positive feelings through a population that Nick Christakis and James Fowler described in Connected

All it takes are two little words: "Thank you"

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

 

 

 

 

Related articles

Herd Instinct in the headlines

Nilsson, artists and the HERD

Memories of the future (4) You, me and everyone we know (again)

First Post: The "Herd Effect"

The anti-nudge herd

The Herd on Holiday again

Herd, Spread and Research World

"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

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.

 

 

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.

Science, Science Club and the brain

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".

 

Social neuroscience: games and social hurt (Amended)

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.

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...!

Not a riot on my own

 

So 12 months on from the UK riots, a lot of thinkpieces around in the papers today

Here's one in the FT from the always reliable @Timharford who asks "Why did riots happen? And is that right question?"

And here's the one I wrote a year ago about precisely the same thing http://bit.ly/RkKuvG  

And here's me on the Today programme talking about exactly the same thing. Again a year ago.

Not in anyway suggesting there's any copying going on - Tim & I both read the same sources on the riots but if you want to know about copying, come to my Sunday Sermon on Sept 9th 

But if not here's some nice boys who want a riot on their own (rare enough for a social species like us humans)

Today in the super soaraway...

In a previous post discussing what the 5-ring Circus (see pic) is revealing about us, I mentioned in passing the lessons about national identity.

Today I want to return to this part of the subject and talk about the striking split emerging between those who see the UK through the lens of Henry VIII, Mary Poppins and Beefeaters (and feel uncomfortable at any evolution of national identity from this) and those who see us as 

human kaleidoscope of a country where those of every race, faith and background are a part of a huge and mostly happy family

Not my words but those of the Sun leader writers (yes, I know). 

Of course, it helps that our multiracial Team GB demonstrate their prowess and determination in front of us and that as we look around (in the crowd, in the pub or in front of one of those really huge screens erected in public places) at our fellow supporters we can see the same kind of shared vibrant shared identity reflected back. And that we had such a uplfiting and novel Opening Ceremony to respond to and interact around. 

But it is striking that this view of who we are is being so widely embraced as an agreed definition of who we are...

Sporting events are great for accelerating this kind of social change - remember how the Mexican Wave (la Ola) emerged from the 1986 Mexica World Cup and how other kinds of public phenomena can create widespread change (as I described in HERD) the cellotaphs (floral tributes to road accident victims) emerged from the death of Princess Diana.

Events like this bring people together and help them interact with people they wouldn't normally see and - as they do - they learn behaviour and feelings and opinions from those around them. Exposure to so many people so frequently and so strongly suggests to each of us that a. this what we now do b. this is what we now feel c. this is what we now think. 

What we do, what we feel and what we think we take from those around us. Remember that line from Oscar Wilde? 

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation

Our deeds, our feelings and our words can all become badges of membership and a challenge to them is often treated as a challenge to the tribe of which we are members [which also serves to explain the incredible bitterness of those who resist the new story]

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arguing rights and wrongs

 

Interesting question here (about what evidence it might take to convince a climate change sceptic of the reality of human-generated climate change).

The simple answer - and one worth bearing in mind the next time you try to persuade someone by argument - is this: nothing.

Not because people are stupid (dumb), wilful or ignorant but simply because much of the time the opinions we hold are not based on rational thinking and the impartial sorting of evidence.

People rarely persuade each other to change their points of view by disputation (which is not to say that we don't enjoy a good rhetorical tumble) but this kind of "show me the facts" thinking doesn't shape much of our view of the world. We are highly selective - we only see what we expect to see, distrust and discount the witnesses who present what we don't want and devalue their evidence if they turn out to be from the other side.

Most of our opinions are received opinions - as Oscar Wilde put it disdainfully,

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation"

They're not based on facts and evidence but on other people's (already second hand) opinions. Very often, the trickiest opinions to shift (like articles of faith) are stubbornly resistent because they are badges of membership to some group or other - a necessary cost of membership.

Add to this the fact that often times, they are also post-rationalisations of what you've already done or chosen (as Andrew Ehrenberg famously observed, I have to think my girlfriend is attractive because she is...after all...my girlfriend) and you can begin see the difficulty in lifting distinguished opponents out of their denial mode.

So next time don't try to win the argument - don't worry about the theology of the piece.

Get your opponents to do something - ideally together - and help them change their own minds after the fact.

 

 

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.

 

Missing the point: thinking about behaviour beyond the individual

In the last post, I tried to articulate what BE fans are missing due to the conceptual blinkers of their fundamentally individualist models of human behaviour. Put simply, they are still stuck thinking about human behaviour in terms of individuals, their quirky cognitive make-up and (here's the new stuff) the context in which individual agents operate (which includes other people around the studied individual).

Ok, maybe not so simple.

Let's try a metaphor. I used this picture* to open that post and deliberately so:
It's something I found at the South Bank Festival of Death for the Living - a picture about loss and grieving made by individual visitors drawing circles (of whatever size) to commemorate a lost one. The only rule being to touch circles drawn by others before you.

Now, it might be interesting and useful to look at the individual participants and their individual decisions about size, location, intensity etc, but given that all participants were united by a. having lost someone dear to them b. willingness to participate, that really is unlikely to tell us much of use in understanding the whole piece (even if asking the individuals concerned would be most interesting and revealing).

Far more interesting and useful in understanding the picture and how it grows is to understand the general principles of how individuals interact with each other and what this means for the picture at scale. Think picture and pattern and not individual and motivation or perception.

Coming back to the BE debate: it's genuinely hard to think about human behaviour beyond the individual but it is really important to do so. This is (I think) what e.g. Paul Ormerod's work on the importance of networks in shaping behaviour is reaching for - albeit through the lense of the n-word.

So when we're told: "there is nothing inherently individualistic about behavioural economics. People draw on all sorts of short-cuts and rules of thumb when making decisions; from looking at what others are doing, or listening to an authority voice, to opting for the middle choice or just picking something they recognise. The concepts and frameworks inspired by BE can embrace multiple contexts and behavioural influences, both social and individual" 

...you know that it's not us missing the point.

Clearer now?

*BTW If you are the artist or you know them, please get in touch! I've tried to track you down via the Southbank but without success.

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neurononsense revisited: a new dawn?

Last night at a reception in memory of the late and great Ginny Valentine, an old buddy of mine asked me what I thought about the proliferation of neuromarketing techniques and the general air of "brain is best" in market research communities.

Perhaps I should have just referred him to David Penn of Conquest who is delighting in being the continuing scourge of snake-oil neuro-research sales persons: his "neuromania" schtick is coming to the MRS in March. Always good value.

Regular readers will know that - like David - I'm deeply suspicious of the willing misrepresentation of the science - of what is currently understood about brain activity and its relationship with behaviour (for example here and here)

Sure, we've got some general principles in place, we've far from the precise, mechanical descriptions that many vendors suggest.

What's more the reality of most human life - and most consumer choices - is social (whether or not the choice is made in the company of others): in much of modern life, we defer to the choices and enthusiasms of others. Trying to predict the behaviour of an isolated individual from the activity in his/her brain is missing the key variable shaping that choice.

Our brains are not - as we tend to think - just independent decision-making muscle - but rather evolved specifically as social organs (as Dunbar and Humphrey  long ago demonstrated - you might remember this more recent paper, too)

This is why this kind of research is so interesting: it explores the neuroscience of social interaction. Dare I suggest put neuromarketing on hold until the academics have got to grips with these - rather more important - factors in influencing behaviour?

 

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

More on Networks from the irrepressible Mr Rheingold

This is a doosie. Not sure we'd agree with everything.

Put your feet up for 15 minutes and listen to the man. 

 

Seth, Santa & the mob

Nice piece from Seth Godin today (HT peter_harrison [email protected]) about the importance of...I'll have what she's having and buying "the" christmas toy:

"...there's no [longer a] mad rush for the "it" gift, the safe, coveted gift that demonstrates the giver was able to finagle a favor or brave a crush of shoppers. The notion of the one, the it, the winner, the safe choice--this is about buying without taking responsibility.

Clearly, there are as many new and wonderful things this season as there are each year, all that's missing is an anointed toy of the year. The masses want to buy what the masses have chosen as the winner, because then the purchase isn't their fault.

And that's what happens every day in just about every market, business or consumer. A few people want to take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome. But most? They just don't want it to be their fault"

Just a couple of thoughts:

i. it's not the absence of mass TV that creates a fragmented and unpredictable marketplace - TV viewing is not as dead as folk like Seth are prone to suggest (though our relationship with it has changed) - but rather the increasing number of connections we have with each other (and the opportunities to see what other folk are having).

ii. it's always interesting to examine the choice of words that people use to describe the early adopters ("take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome...") and the rest of us ("the mass...isn't their fault").

It's not just Seth, we all do it. The lionising and fetishation of early adopters - like Apple's "the crazy ones" - is something we marketers could do with having less of next year, please. It's an unhelpful bit of extrapolation from poorly misunderstood social science. Early adopters vary by market and by occasion and by context; and most of what is chosen by the cool kids never gets anywhere - the legwarmer revival anyone?

Learning from each other is core to what makes our species successful - pretending it's not and that independent choice rules the world is just wrong. And shows how blinded we are by our cultural blinkers...

Happy Christmas, nonetheless, Seth. Hope you have what I'm having... 

 

 

 

I'll Have What She's Having - implications for marketers

So now you've got the book - you have got one, haven't you? Everyone else has - and you've dipped into it a few times and maybe pondered what it says and what it means.

Here are some thoughts on what I think it means for marketers that I wrote for Market Leader, the organ of the UK's Marketing Society.

Let us know what you think - about the book and what you think the implications 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.

Measuring influence

pic c/o Protein.os

This morning - in a rage at the latest Klout bollox, I stumbled over this great briefing by the Protein guys on the thorny subject on measuring influence.

Smart, pithy and concluding with words of bleedin' obvious/wisdom (delete as appropriate) from yours truly (think about it in terms of the real world first).

Enjoy!

 

6/7 cats say "independent individuals"

 

Interesting dialogue in one of the LinkedIn Behavioural Economics groups about how little (or otherwise) the BE movement has embraced the social insights.

We've talked about this here before but one of my dialogue partners has drawn my attention to the New Economics Forum equivalent of HMG's Mindspace which puts "Other people's behaviour..." as principle #1.

However...by my count, that still makes 6/7 of the "principles" about individual minds...improving the odds slightly (down from 7/8)

..just more of the same, then

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.

 

Marketoonist extraordinaire

Last week in Chicago had the good fortune to catch up again with the delightful Tom Fishburne AKA Marketoonist

Regular readers will know how much I love the wit and insight of that other marketing top toonist, Hugh Macleod but am chuffed that Tom had been led to do an I'll Have What She's Having toon since we last met down in West Wales

And lovely it is, too.

Do yourself a favour, go sign up for their regular toon mail-outs. You'll see the world differently through Tom and Hugh's eyes

 

 

 

 

 

I'll have what John, Eaon and Gareth are having

 

Pic c/o @willsh

 

Our new book is finally here and last night we premiered content at the RSA (many thanks to Matthew Taylor who mc'd and Mairi who put on the show)

Don't listen to what we say about it, listen to what John, Gareth And Eoghan say (and perhaps not what this lady whom we seem to have upset - actually maybe it's good to make someone want to "throw your book across the room")

Buy it here or here 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Flowers and apples at Apple stores to mourn Jobs

Pic c/o digitalhen and BBC News

Lots of noise online today about the demise of Apple's leader Steve Jobs.

A lot of expressive socially transmitted behaviour emerging here and here.

Thanks to Joseph Kay and Tom Donald (@thepunkrockshop) for pointing out the odd tributes left at the stores: flowers, yes but half-eaten apples?

Any more examples, greatfully received...

Riot on my own?

Finished an article today for Admap with my chum Alex Bentley, which uses - among other things - the recent riots to illustrate how near the surface our [wrong-headed] assumptions about human behaviour are.

Coincidentally both the Guardian and the BBC have chosen today to kick off public examinations into the causes of the recent riots.

The Guardian have chosen to repeat the format of the famous Detroit study into those disturbances and are embracing a collaboration with the LSE and (as they have learned to do from the MPs expenses) with a broader reader base. (They've also done this fab infographic)

The BBC have opted for a more informal town-hall style live event (video or twitter).

Listening to the latter it's clear how easily the conversation becomes too specific - about the particular things that happened in a particular place at a particular time and the particular causes of it. What gets lost is the underlying mechanics of this temporary outbreak - the copying. Too much already is either route #1 moralising about individuals or route #1A big-abstract-forces- acting-on-individuals kinds of argument; too little is understanding this event in the context of other such events.

Equally - as is all too often the case in market research - the individuals involved (in whatever way) are likely not to be very reliable witnesses, either about themselves or about the larger events. This is as true of the Guardian study as the BBC talking shop.

Fundamentally, only by understanding the behaviour as a social phenomenon (and not one rooted in individauls) can we really get to grips with it and start to understand what we might do differently next time. Think about it: a riot on your own? [sorry Messrs Strummer/Jones]

 

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?

 

 

We're all going to the Zoo

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!

 

 

I vote, we vote

Pic c/o echoblog
One of the most treasured features of most modern societies is the democratic processes we use to distribute power and make decisions about the stuff that matters to us: so important are they, that we often treat democracy as the key marker for civilisation. And as we all know, a number of us have tried to take and impose the idea and the practices on other cultures.

But the practice of democracy is curiously fabricated one (not good, not bad just a cultural product). We go to extraordinary lengths to make it work: fetishizing the "secrecy of the polling booth"; controlling (in the UK, at least) election spending by candidates, banning exit (and sometimes) opinion polls during elections and sometimes (as in Australia) making voting a legal obligation, not just a right.

And yet, it's clear how often people use social heuristics to make their democratic decisions - we vote as those around us vote. In the past this has played out in terms of very tribal voting patterns in Britain and the US.

Even today - as we in Britain have voted on how we want to organised our voting - while there has been some discussion of the relative virtues of the current system and proposed alternative one, most of the noise around the debate has been in terms of "who's":

i.e. Who's backing which option? Who's going to benefit from the vote going this way or the other? Who's a vote for or against change going to hurt most?

Try as we might, we can't stop humans being social

Innovation, random drift & Isaac Newton

HT Gareth and Katy for this lovely animation of how a line drawn by 500 people one after another changes and evolves. HERD fans who've seen the live show might remember a very silly game I've used to make the same poi 
nt [about 6 minutes into this video or right at the end of this one...or after 12 or so minutes here].

Random Drift is the geneticists' term for the kind of change we observe in a population's genes which is driven by a series of neutral [i.e. small accidental] changes [one following another], rather than as the result of important changes in the environment which encouraged the selection of a particular gene over another.

The big moral is this: because we are social creatures who cannot escape the world of others in to which we are born [or indeed turn off our own tendency to copy what's going on around us]  much of what we call new or innovative is really just a miscopy of what's gone before - this despite all our efforts at being creative, original and innovative, 

Of course, you can tell yourself you are different (and gain some kudos from being seen to be so) but maybe you might just follow Isaac Newton's confession:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Is our rush to encourage and champion [deliberate or intentional] "innovation" perhaps missing the point?

 

 

 

 

Montaigne, mimicry and the mirror neurons

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