Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Choosing wine: a people-thing or a thing-thing?

Pic c/o Fulldorm.com

Interesting post over at the Guardian about some research suggesting wine experts are not the best folk to turn to to help you choose wine.

Couple of things here:

1. It's not that surprising, given the difficulties in choosing from large and often indistinguishable wine options that regular people often follow the recommendations of those they see as experts - outsourcing the cognitive load, we call it, to those we imagine know better. In other words, that choosing wine is often a people-thing rather than a thing-thing. We equally use heuristics like a. what I recognise b. what I see other people drinking (I'll have what she's having), what's culturally appropriate (red wine with meat) or we might use price as an indicator (with all of the framing effects that Behavioural Economists love to talk about).

2. Nor is it surprising that the experts too find it difficult to choose, too. Or that they also defer to experts and expertise that they discern from others. The notion of expertise in any field tends to be much more culturally than empirically-based - i.e. it's a people not a thing-thing. There are lots of examples of how bad expertise advice can be; don't forget, Tversky & Kahnemann's early work on human inability to calculate probabliities was based on work comparing patients and medical professionals (and the latter proved just as prone to the cognitive biases described as those who looked to them for advice).

What strikes me is how odd it seems to us that experts don't know and can't tell products apart. And how disappointed or wronged we feel at the news that they don't know. We make sense of our use of copying experts in terms of some supposed expertise about the thingness of our choices and this seems to be undermined by experts' failure to deliver. (Tom Ewing's musings on how the role of chance in popular music are always worth a listen...

All of which serves to remind us that many more things than our default assumption that choosing is primarily done as a thing-thing is wrong; far better to assume it's a people-thing.

 

 

 

 

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]

The Dunciad

Thanks very much to Andy Nairn who posted this kind tribute on Campaign's blog

"Dunce" as in John Dun Scotus (not Pope's satirical piece see above)

 

Smarter than we think

Nice spot by that charming man, Will Humphrey - a piece by Franz de Waal in the WSJ describing how much we underestimate the cognitive powers of our animal cousins. Have a read.

HERD fans will know we've long made this kind of case. We've talked about how Orangs for example, not only have cultures but develop them in the same ways as we humans do our own cultures. 

Denying the connection just messes with our thinking: you know that old saw "Monkey See Monkey Do" - turns out we humans are much better at copying than they (or other primates) are and our (Western) obsession with originality is not the real gift; copying is what makes us.

This is just one of many ways in which we try to separate ourselves from them, when in fact who and how we are has very strong roots in them.We are - for good or ill - a Super Social Ape and not the unique and inevitably successful creature we imagine we are (as the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, if we were to re-run the tape of evolution, it's far from clear that we'd end up as we are or as successful as we are).

Calls for some humility, I'd say

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 Formerwhitehat@wordpress.com

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

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.

 

 

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.

Top Banker: how banking taught us the wrong lesson about financial incentives

"Motivation does not come from financial incentives alone. Again, the financial sector has done us all a disservice in promoting the belief that massive financial compensation is necessary to motivate individuals".

So writes Mervyn King, Chairman of the bank of England. about what might levers we might pull to drive up economic activity.

It's worth cutting this out and keeping it.

If you think people only do stuff for money - or even mostly do stuff for money - you'd be wrong. 

There are lots of other sorts of reward and disincentives - not least is the social stuff that we go on about [people doing what other people do, for instance]. 

Put it this way: financial incentives presume that individuals are primarily financial optimisers, acting independently in their own interest. Paul Ormerod makes this point really well in his new book - "incentives" tend to be part of an "individualist" or "I" model of behaviour.

Some people are focused on financial incentives all the time [we call them things like "greedy mothers"], all of us can be taught to be that way [ditto] but...and there's quite lot of evidence that financial incentives can overwhelm other intrinsic motivations in certain circumstances [prosocial behaviour can actually reduce when you pay volunteers].

But - it's far from clear that financial incentives always have a positive impact in shaping behaviour in the desired direction, be it in personal health, charitable activity or criminal activity. Sometimes they actually have a negative effect [as above] becoming the reason why you continue to do something.

So if you're looking to change behaviour, please be careful with financial incentives: they don't work like they say they do [not least because we're not like they say we are] and they can actually work against the desired outcome.

Look for the other - often [pro]social - motivations.

And as we ponder our own lives, it's worth listening to wise people like Sir Ken Robinson and Hugh Macleod who remind us to focus on our passions and our talents and let the money follow those two.

Whatever it is you do, don't just do it for the money...

 

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...!

More Olympics shockers

If you're not fed up with Op-Eds on what the Olympics...(sorry just fell asleep there), here's one I did for MIT press on how we learned to love...

And if you haven't had enough Boris today...

 

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)

And another thing about the Olympics and what it tells us about us.

Probably the smartest thing that LOCOG have done in seeking to engage the UK population is to go local.

By that I mean going 8000 miles over 70 days and visiting countless "locales" - i.e. places where real people live and thrive with other people. The hard yards, you might call it.

And to create the sense of shared excitement for those on the route - offering the chance to thousands of people to participate (and compete to do so) each of which is recognisable in their own locale - it seems to have followed all the rules of the modern engagement strategy.

The torch relay isn't a new idea but nor is it "authentically" Olympian (as the London2012 site tries to suggest) but as this piece shows, it has [ahem] interesting German roots

But it is a fantastic social diffusion idea: gathering crowds of people familiar to each other - or from the same place, at least - getting them excited with anticipation and getting them to see and feel each others' excitement. Flags, cheering, crowds, epic journey - all of these help.

Simple stuff, you might think but not something marketers today can be bothered with doing.

Go where the people are (rather than just shout at them).

Give them something (interesting & fun) to do together.

Help them see the excitement of those around them and those before and after them.

And start well ahead of time (building your audience's excitement well before you need it).

Not tricky, is it?

Key learning is this: audiences are not individuals acting independently - pairs of eyeballs or whatever the media measurement guys count.

Audiences are individuals interacting with each other around your activities. The more you encourage this further things spread.

You're building networks not sending information to individual agents.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neuroscientism and neuroporn (updated)

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

Habit and the HERD (I)

Am ploughing my way through Charles Duhigg's new book on Habits at the moment and - the basic point about habits and our tendency default to low-level cognitive activity aside - am finding it all rather disappointingly and over familiar territory. 

Not just in terms of the overkill of neuro-cartography ("we know that this is important because there's something going on in the brain here...") but in terms of the ideas of habits being shaped by rewards and repetition (in what way is this not classical conditioning?).

Add to that the lionising of dead Mad Men and their supposed magical abilities to change habits among the larger population (highly overstated, as it happens).

And let's be honest, the relentless invididualist & materialist perspective: presenting human behaviour as the product of fundamentally isolated individuals and their biology....

I've been promised that it gets better later - as Neil spotted:

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

Now, that's more like it. I'm hoping we get there sooner rather than later.

 

 

 

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.

 

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

 

 

 

One tree stands alone in the forest?

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.

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!

 

 

What the audience do with your data

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.

 

People stories vs. Thing stories

Talking last week to a good chum who's done some great stuff applying storytelling to brands prompted me to dig out this paper from Alex Mesoudi and the great Robin Dunbar. Download Mesoudi_whiten_dunbar_BJP_2006

Essentially, the learning for you and me in our storytelling activities on behalf of brands, organisations and our own ideas is this: people remember the people details not the thing details.

So use 'em or lose 'em, as the adage goes (and don't get hung up on the fact that people are more interested in each other than in you and your brand/policy).

 

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

Human robots = copying robots

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

Individualism: why Behavioural Economics is a dead-end

Read a very disappointing Green Paper from the Cabinet Office (HMGovernment's policy HQ) today on Charitable Giving. 

Disappointing not for the recommendations per se (up to you to make your mind up of what you think of them politically) but on the quality of the thinking behind them. Despite having built a crack team to rethink how policy and behaviour change might interact and taking soundings in all kinds of places, they've come up with essentially nothing which is likely to have an impact on the behaviour of the UK population in the area of charitable giving.

Put simply, the paper clings onto the old individualist type of models that have shaped policy for generations. Minister Frances Maude: [my italics]

"Social action is not something that government can, or should, compel [individual] people to do; it has to be built from the bottom up, on the back of free decisions by individuals to give to causes around them. This is not easy, particularly given the pressures of life in 21st century Britain. For many of us it can feel like a struggle just to keep up with commitments spanning work, family, and friends.

So the call to social action needs to speak to individuals’ motivations and account for the obstacles to giving; to fit with people’s lifestyles and interests. In short, giving should be made as easy and attractive as possible"

No surprise, maybe, given that the Nudgers and the Peacock Tailors are the key source of insight into human behaviour (what tosh btw is the essay on Human Nature?).

As we've observed before, both these schools cling on to the default setting for thinking about our species as a fundamentally individualist one and human behaviour as a fundamentally individual phenomenon (rather than the fundamentally social one we've been arguing for). (And no, it's not good enough to mention "social influence" or gesture wildly at "social norms" as if they were something that got done to individuals and thus easily fabricated - our social species takes influence from those around us and co-creates social norms with the many hundreds and thousands of folk we share our world with - without understanding the mechanics of these kind of things, you're unlikely to get them working for you)

I think it was Emile Durkheim who noted that something qualifies as an ideology when it stops being an assertion or assumption and just becomes part of how we see the world.

Until we get beyond this Individualist Ideology embedded in the neo-dismal sciences, nothing much is going to change round here and that's a really big worry for both Big Society Fans and the rest of us.

 

A very social Yuletide message

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"

It's a nice piece which explores solitary confinement in US prisons and what it does to those who are kept separate from their peers.

Christmas is not a good time to be alone but for many of us it can be hard to be with others (particularly relatives whom you've spent another year avoiding).

Think of this over the next few days - our species is fundamentally adapted for a world of others and (tiresome though your relatives might be) they are all you'll ever have.

I think that this is what the priest officiating at my mother's funeral earlier this year meant when he said, 

"in the end, it's only people that matter - that's all we ever have"

So try make the most of the time you share. One day, they and you'll both be gone.