I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping social behaviour-- Mark Earls

Mark Earls and Alex Bentley at the RSA 2011, promoting their new book.

Central thesis: as social animals, humans are predisposed to copy others.

They map human decision making using a 2-by. The axes are "number of options" and "who/how we copy". Given that this 2-by is the core tennant of their idea, I find it odd that it is damn difficult to find an image of this map.

Of course I did find it, buried in a research paper published by Prof. Bentley ("Quality vs mere popularity: a conceptual map for understanding human behavior", Mind and Society 2011)

Boring figure, x axis on wrong margin, and no data plotted.

The four corners are:

1. NW: classical rational actor. Assumes a discernable (and predictable) difference between the options. Popular choices are high quality/high payout.
2. NE: Copy the leader/expert. Copy if better. He relates it to Watts' 2002 innovators, early adopters, and late majority model.
3. SW: Overwhelming choice with little/no difference between outcomes--275 different types of breakfast cereal??
4. SE: Copy the crowd. Power law distribution of outcomes, with the winner a matter of luck.

Timeline evolution popularity of items in the quadrants:

1. NW: r-curve of adoptation. Rapid growth in popularity of the "better" option.
2. NE: a slightly smoother adoptation curve, since the quality of an item is partially based on how many others have chosen it
3. SW: no trend, distribution is uniformly random
4. SE: Best predictor of popularity is current distribution. He links it to a previous paper of his, "Evolving social influence in large populations" Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2010

Camilla Power points out some serious flaws with the book

[the book is] a random scatter of cases and anecdotes ... [which] makes the reader feel equally random: scatterbrained, as if you've been doing idle searches on Google or browsing Wikipedia all day. The kind of theoretical coherence found in the elegant, simple propositions of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene or Amotz and Avishag Zahavi's The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle is not evident.

and views the model as applying mostly to

low-cost decisions on tree-like algorithms that matter little to the decision-maker

The authors respond to the last criticism by saying that true, that is the corner of the map the book focuses on, but only because that is the kind of data they study. The map should apply to all decisions.

But they miss Ms. Power's point. If indeed they mostly apply their model to the SE corner, then she is right, that is what the model examines. And at this corner, the profound impact of the book applies mostly to marketing people. It does not suggest how to create the large-scale social changes the authors wish it to. To smoke or not smoke is a classic Northern question, as the choices are binary with strongly discernable outcomes.