4. Ideas Illustrated;

Imagine the world is a living breathing wiki. There’s no possible way to store all the necessary information in a single isolated mind... instead, we use the people around us as an enormous hard drive from which we can retrieve information. Written by Collyn Ahart, with illustration by Dominic McKenzie.

Recently undertaking some research, I wanted to find out why women knew so little technical information about bicycles. As it emerged, women know that men often spend countless hours reading up on new products and technical specifications; men even practice solving mechanical issues so they become quite well-versed in the territory. Women have realised that asking men for advice on bike stuff is just a short-cut to an answer. As it turns out, a woman knows just as much about bicycle mechanics as the men in her life because instead of storing the information in her own mind, she stores it in the minds of her male counterparts. Like a giant wiki, all she has to do to access the information is ask.

In their new book, 'I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior', “Herdmeister” Mark Earls, anthropologists Alex Bentley and Michael J. O’Brien explore the various learning and decision-making models through the lens that the most important aspect defining humans is that we are inherently social animals. We need each other and thrive on social interaction.

Increased human intelligence over the last millennia is attributed not to some improvement in homo sapien brain function but rather to the fact there are just a lot more of us in the world. We’re not inherently smarter, we’re just more social.

As such, our ability to connect, communicate - and most importantly - copy each other is the key to human intelligence. Building on theories of collective thinking (which suggest groups of uninitiated people are better equipped than individuals to produce accurate answers to unknown questions), Earls et al dig into the practical questions of how this giant human mind we call “sociality” actually educates and informs our knowledge and decision making processes. 

The authors suggest there are two primary ways people learn. The first through individual learning, and the second, through copying. Much of the marketing and political orthodoxy still maintain the most effective (and likely assert, ethical) way to get people to think and do something is by providing them with information individually. This is the approach of: “Make the information widely available and people will consider it on their own.” However, as the authors point out, the models for uptake of information are a lot more complicated. It’s not like you can get people to quit smoking, drinking or over-eating by bombarding them with marketing messages along. You have to change their whole social context. Make smoking uncomfortable by making it illegal to smoke inside, or around children, or even in public spaces and the knock-on effect is more people are smoking less. And the more people adopt a certain behaviour, the more other people will too. This adaptation and adoption is what the authors call “cascading”.

Copying the behaviour of others can happen in a few different ways. “Copy if [rationally] better” and “copy the majority” are two instances of directed copying. But when the context is too complicated- say, if there are lots and lots and LOTS of things to choose from- people experience a sort of “choice overload” whereby copying becomes undirected and a lot less predictable. With two political candidates it’s much easier to predict an outcome. Add a third and the whole thing becomes a lot more complicated and harder to determine. The addition of a viable third candidate in the 2010 UK parliamentary elections meant the race became highly uncertain and resulted in a hung parliament.

The world, however, is full of directed and undirected copying... and a combination of the two. All of which is made even more complicated by the social context. Are there a lot of people? Are there a lot of choices?

'I’ll Have What She’s Having' is basically a highly informative tool-kit for understanding the exchange of knowledge and behaviour between people and is a must-read for anyone engaged in marketing and social media. As they’ve said, the world doesn’t need more data about human behaviour, it just needs better tools for mapping and understanding it.



Collyn Ahart is a freelance insight, innovation and brand strategy consultant working with YCN.
Dominic McKenzie is a freelance illustrator.

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