I'll Have What She's Having Mapping Social Behavior

by Bentley, R. Alexander; Earls, Mark; O'Brien, Michael J.; Maeda, John

• ISBN13: 9780262016155
• ISBN10: 026201615X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-26
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Humans are, first and foremost, social creatures. And this, according to the authors of I'll Have What She's Having, shapes--and explains--most of our choices. We're not just blindly driven by hard-wired instincts to hunt or gather or reproduce; our decisions are based on more than "nudges" exploiting individual cognitive quirks.I'll Have What She's Having shows us how we use the brains of others to think for us and as storage space for knowledge about the world. The story zooms out from the individual to small groups to the complexities of populations. It describes, among other things, how buzzwords propagate and how ideas spread; how the swine flu scare became an epidemic; and how focused social learning by a few gets amplified as copying by the masses. It describes how ideas, behavior, and culture spread through the simple means of doing what others do.It is notoriously difficult to change behavior. For every "Yes We Can" political slogan, there are thousands of "Just Say No" buttons. I'll Have What She's Having offers a practical map to help us navigate the complex world of social behavior, an essential guide for anyone who wants to understand how people behave and how to begin to change things.

Author Biography

R. Alexander Bentley is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).

Mark Earls is a London-based author and consultant on marketing, communication, and behavior change.

Michael J. O'Brien is Provost and Professor of History at Texas A&M University–San Antonio and the coauthor of I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).

An internationally recognized leader at the intersection of design and technology, John Maeda is Executive Vice President/Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient. He was the 16th President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He is the author of Design by Numbers, The Laws of Simplicity, and Redesigning Leadership, all published by The MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Preface: In Katz's Deli	p. ix
Out of the Trees	p. 1
Playboy and the Pleistocene	p. 3
The Forest for the Trees: The Social Side of Things	p. 8
Organizing Our Thinking as Trees	p. 11
Rules of the Game	p. 15
Copying Brain, Social Mind	p. 25
More Really Is Different	p. 27
Why Copy?	p. 29
The Social Brain: Organized in Trees	p. 32
The Social Mind and Collective Memory	p. 35
Social Learning, En Masse	p. 41
Models of Social Diffusion	p. 44
Anyone for "Less Nuanced"?	p. 48
Why "Cold Fusion" Is Different	p. 51
The Idea and the Virus	p. 55
Heard That Name Before?	p. 57
Traditions	p. 62
Cascades	p. 67
Unintended Cascades	p. 68
"Impact" Cascades	p. 70
Not Solid Ground	p. 71
Things Get Complex	p. 73
When Power Laws Cascaded	p. 76
Avalanches and Wildfires	p. 78
Cascades in Highly Connected Networks	p. 81
Trees, Again	p. 83
Learning from Cascades	p. 85
When in Doubt, Copy	p. 87
Extending the Game	p. 90
Long Tails	p. 91
Copycats	p. 94
How Are People Copying?	p. 105
Mapping Collective Behavior	p. 111
A Map with Four Regions	p. 114
The Age of "What She's Having"	p. 123
Back in the Deli	p. 126
Bibliography	p. 129
Index	p. 141
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