Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

The Letterman Question

Here's a piece I did for the CASRO 2012-13 Journal (based on my keynote at their annual gathering in Scotssdale (page 42ff) based on an idea that the brilliant Grant McCracken gave me when I last had lunch with him:

"TV chat show host David Letterman used to play a game with his audience as he sifted the day’s ephemera, asking this simple question of the things he (and his researchers) found to point and laugh at: is this anything? Or, is it nothing? In other words, is the object, behaviour or utterance significant and suggestive of an important trend? Or, is it merely junk? Should we be paying attention to it or should we smile and nod at contemporary culture’s richness as it sweeps past our noses"

So let's ask ourselves before we start "...what kind of thing is the phenomenon we are studying and seeking to explain [or change]? Is it something shaped by the agency of individuals acting independently of their peers or is it something that’s shaped primarily by social means – by the influence of others other than the individual?"

  What kind of thing is this?

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.

 

 

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

How things spread [Redux]

 

Earlier this year, I got Alex Bentley & Mike O'Brien together at the RSA to share a view - grounded in something called "cultural evolution" - of how to understand how things spread.

Here's the film of our little show [c/o Surinder]

And if you're good, I might get round to blogging about Touchdown Jesus, later on...

 

Together in Amsterdam

 
Today's the main holiday of the Netherlands - Queen's Day - a celebration of "saamhorigheid" (togetherness).

Appropriate then that I've been here hanging out with the lovely folk at The Next Web and sharing some HERD-love (if you get a chance next year, get yourself down there).

And launching the Dutch version of HERD ["De ultieme kudde"] with the delightful Sander of Maven publishing (btw fab forward by Rijn of Blauw Research - thanks, mate!)

As the man/machine say: I'll be back

Speechifying HERD

 

More and more interesting speaking gigs coming up (watch this space).

Including this one, for howies' do-lectures in September with this amazing line-up

Nothing to do with this storyDownload Open books, though (I suspect)

Tools from evolutionary science for understanding Human Behaviour

 

Very excited about the session I'm running at the Market Research Society Conference at the end of March:

I've got Dr. Alex Bentley and Professor Mike O'Brien confirmed for a session exploring how they have applied ideas and techniques from evolutionary science to the study of human behaviour. 

If you thought all evolution had to offer the study of contemporary human behaviour was Geoffrey Miller & Robin Wight's Peacock's Tailery (that most of what we do, we do to signal our reproductive fitness), then think again. Cultural evolution is now a highly developed multi-disciplined, many-headed school that has much more to say to us - not least, it uses hard data, not speculation to do its thinking. 

Now as we have these guys in London for a few days - would anyone be interested a longer, more detailed session to explore these ideas further and to share their techniques?

Carnival in San Sebastian

 

Off next week to San Sebastian in the Basque country of Spain to do the keynote at the ABLA conference.

While out-of-season seaside resorts always hold a certain charm for me (well, apart from Cannes, that is) I'm kind of hoping that the trip coincides with the beginning of Carnival - a very HERDy time in the calendar.

A time when people get together and - enthused, as the Ancient Greeks would put (that is, possessed by the deity) - challenge the rich and the powerful. A time when that HERD part of our nature is nearer the surface than perhaps we/they'd like

Maybe I'll just be there for the TInkers' parade. How appropriate, either way!

PS if you're going to ABLA, do let me know and come and say Hi!

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

  

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...

On the road

 
When I'm on the road, doing my speaking gigs or just travelling to work with folk far away, I find things are a bit clearer.

Maybe it's view from 30000 ft, maybe the tiredness, maybe the isolation from the daily round but it always reminds me why I do what I do and why it matters. (props to Hugh)

And why not doing it is impossible (or at least not possible for me - check the middle 8 here for more details)

Me & JayZ and Anna

Nice post over at Research Live by the supersmart Anna in response  to what I said here about the importance of copying in shaping human behaviour (yes, I know again...)

She describes how different collective behaviours she observed at a recent Coldplay gig she attended (JayZ's hiphop bounce, (mexican) waves and a novel cameraphone wave) spread throught the audience to differing degrees.

From this, she posits that the reason why the cameraphone wave spread so far is something to do with some characteristics of the behaviour itself (that it was in some way superior the other two, less successful behaviours).

While cameraphonewave does sound fantastic and sparkly, can I suggest an alternative analysis which is nothing to do with the relative appeal of the behaviours to the audience: it doesn't have to be about the thing!

i.To paraphrase Paul Ormerod , Most [of our attempts to spread] Things Fail - it is genuinely hard to get a population to adopt any particular behaviour at the time and in the way that you want them to. This means that it is not surprising that the "failed" crowd behaviours were unsuccessful. Whether you are JayZ trying to get folk to bounce or the bloke at the end of row Z trying to start a mexican wave, it's more likely than not that the crowd won't pick up your thing. It's nothing to do with the thing or the influence of the person trying to spread their thing - it's just plain hard to get other folk to adopt anything.

ii. Alex's work has shown again and again how this failure rate is characteristic of random copying (the sort of copying we see in crowds and much popular culture today): one of the best ways to tell if you have random copying overtime is to see if you've got stochastic changes to popularity (or spread) rankings. It doesn't matter much which thing is adopted by whom - it's all on the basis of copying our peers.

iii. It's striking however how readily we adopt the post-hoc explanation of the success of one behaviour being somehow better (or fitter or whatever) than those things that failed. Nick Taleb's Black Swan makes much of this kind of thinking error and it's pretty poor science, too, to look to the winner to guide what we do next. That's why - however appealing they seem - those 100 habits of successful employees/brands/etc books are fundamentally flawed. I'm afraid, I looks like this is an example of that.

Let's be clear thought: this doesn't mean that Anna's points on fun/ease/visibility/novelty as features you should adopt if you want your behaviour to spread are always going to be irrelevant (many are shared by the other 'failed" behaviours); nor, at some level or other, is it untrue we are programmed to search for meaning and purpose; but it's just that in this case, contrary to what A's post suggests, copying and mimicry can account for all the phenomena described. Sorry.

The end of the Big Idea?

Here (courtesy of Adage) is a nice little clip of me in NYC at the 4As Summer of Planning event explaining a little of why the idea of the Big Idea is really...well, NOT such a big thing to worry about anymore

Sure it's useful for agencies - and sure it's easier to manage complex organisations to produce and deliver against them - but frankly, in a world in which social influence reigns, it's less and less relevant. Do more stuff, place more bets, light more fires, give yourself more chances that one at least of your ideas takes off.

Who'd have thought it, eh?

Of course, charging for this is a whole other game....

PS The green walls are those of JWT's lovely bar area but the haircut is my own unfortunate choice.

Oh, and Flickr feeds for NYC and SF - thanks AAAA for having me!