Social Physics: How good ideas spread

Social physics: how good ideas spread-the lessons from a new science

Author: Alex Pentland

” Adam Smith himself understood that it is our social fabric and guides the invisible hand of the market and not just competition alone. In his book theory of moral sentiments he argued that it was human nature to exchange not only goods but also ideas assistance and favors out of sympathy. Furthermore, he thought that these social social exchanges guided capitalism to create solutions for the good of the community. Smith, though, live in an era or almost all the bourgeoise residents in the city knew each other and were constrained by social pressure to be good citizens. Without the obligations provided by strong social ties, capitalism often turns rapacious of politics turns poisonous.  In our new hyper connected world, most Thais are we and all too often the invisible hand no longer functions.” P. 3

Pentland here is suggesting that was social physics we can now describe and analyze ”the invisible hand”, and see why it works , how it works, how it can work better, and how it may become dysfunctional, and how that dysfunction can even threaten the collapse of marketplaces and social continuity.

Here's a great metaphor:

” We all sale in a stream of ideas, ideas that are the examples and stories of the peers who surround us; exposure to the stream shapes our habits and beliefs. We can resist the flow if we try, even choose to row to another stream, but most of our behavior issued by the ideas we are exposed to. The idea flow within the streams binds us together into a sort of collective intelligence one comprised of the shared learning of our peers.”

What is the relationship between reason and argument in this learning process?

According to recent research in cognitive science, human beings have basically 2 ways of thinking a fast way and a slow way, a more automatic intuitive way and a more deliberative rational way of thinking believing in analyzing. The fast thinking aspects of online intuitive ones are basically habits and intuitions that we learn by associating ideas from our experiences and those we've learned by observing other people. The slow mode uses more rational mechanisms that combine our beliefs into logical patterns whereby we can make inferences and reach new conclusions. p. 56

” many scientists believe that the vast majority of our daily behavior is due to fast thinking—we literally don't have the time to think things through using slow thinking.” P. 57

Most people intuitive judgments or fast thinking tend to be more on truest and cooperative the decisions made for deliberative rational fast thinking. For example the reactions of spectators at the Boston Marathon bombings. Pentland argues that this "fast thinking core of human nature" is essential for building and maintaining strong communities.

“My experiments suggested that continual exploratory behavior pumas is a quick learning process that is guided by apparent popularity among peers. In contrast, adoption of habits and preferences is a slow process that requires repeated exposure and perceptual validation within a community of peers. Our social world consists of the rush and excitement of new ideas harvested through exploration, and then the quieter and slower process of engaging with peers in order to winnow through these ideas, to determine which should be converted into personal habits and social norms.” P. 58

“The goal of this book is to develop a social physics that extends economic and political thinking by including not only competitive forces, but also exchanges of ideas information, social pressure, and social status in order to more fully explain human behavior. To accomplish this we will have to explain not only how social interactions affect individual goals and decisions but, more important, how the social effects produce Adam Smith's otherwise mysterious invisible hand.” P. 4

“This focus on the floor of ideas is why I chose the name 'social physics'. Just as the role of traditional physics is to understand how the flow of energy translates into changes in motion, social physics seeks to understand how the flow of ideas and information translates into changes in behavior.” p.5

“The social physics is just, as mathematics, it is usually restricted to specifically trained experts. I believe that open impact also depends upon whether it provides people—for example, government and industry leaders, academics, and average citizens—a language that is better than the old vocabulary of markets and classes capital and production. Words such as “markets,” “political classes,” and “social movements” shape our thinking about the world. They're useful, of course, but they also represent overly simplistic thinking; they therefore limit our ability to think clearly and effectively. In this book will put forward a new set of concepts which I believe we can more accurately discuss our world and plan the future.” Page 8

“The engine that drives social physics is big data: the newly ubiquitous digital data now available about all aspects of human life. Social physics functions by analyzing patterns of human experience and idea exchange within the digital breadcrumbs you all leave behind as we move through the world–call records, credit card transactions, and GPS location fixes, among others. These data tell the story of everyday life for recording with each of us has chosen to do. And this is very different from what is put on Facebook; postings on Facebook or would people choose to tell each other, edited according to the standards of the day. Who we actually are is more accurately determined by where we spent our time in which things we buy not just by what we say we do. The process of analyzing the patterns within these digital breadcrumbs is called reality mining, and through it we can tell an enormous amount about who individuals are”. Page 8-9

“The scientific method used in social physics is different from that used in most social sciences, because it principally relies on “ living laboratories”. Page 9

“Just as when Dutch lens makers created the 1st practical lenses and thus enabled researchers to build the 1st microscopes and telescopes, my research lab and I have created tools that collect all the digital breadcrumbs from entire community, enabling us to build some of the 1st practical “socio-scopes.” These new tools give a view of life in all its complex and—and are the future of social science. Just as the microscope and telescope revolutionized the study of biology and astronomy, socio-scopes and living labs will revolutionize the study of human behavior.” Page 10

“… This new approach is similar to economics, because of it's quantitative, predictive character.  Indeed, much of the language used in this book draws economics. Rather than study how economic agents work out economies function, social physics seeks to understand how the flow of ideas turns into behaviors and action. Put another way, social physics is about how human behavior is driven by the exchange of ideas—how people cooperate to discover, select, and learn strategies and coordinate their actions—rather than how markets are driven by the exchange of money.” Page 16

“Social physics also shares some surface resemblance to other academic domains, such as the cognitive sciences. The contrast between most, science and social physics is quite important, however. Rather than focusing on individual thoughts and emotions, social physics offices on social learning is the major driver of habits and norms. A fundamental assumption is that learning from examples of the people's behavior (and the relevant contextual features) is the major and likely, mechanism of behavior change in humans.” Page 16 

“Our society has already begun a great journey that will rival revolutions such as printing and the Internet. For the 1st time, we will have the data required to really know ourselves and understand how society evolves. By better understanding of yourself we can potentially build a world without fear or financial crashes in which infectious diseases quickly detected and stopped, which energy,water, and other resources are no longer wasted, and in which governments are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.' Page 19

“Social physics assumes that human societies are mostly made up of exchanges between individuals instead of describing society is composed of classes or markets.” Page 21

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people probably did something, they feel little guilty, because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seems obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had to synthesize new things.” Steve Jobs page 26

“The most consistently creative and insightful people are explorers. They spend an enormous amount of time seeking out new people and different ideas, without necessarily trying very hard to find “best” people or “best” ideas. Instead, they seek out people with different views and different ideas.” Page 26

“The most productive people are constantly developing and testing a new story, adding newly discovered I used to the story in trying it out on everyone they meet.” Page 27 

"...this exploration process is fundamentally a search of one social network..” Page 27

“It seems that the key to harvesting ideas that lead to great decisions is to learn from the successes and failures of others to make sure that opportunities of this sort of social learning are sufficiently diverse"

What can a single individual due to the increased rate of idea flow in their part of their social network? …*Producers engaged in preparatory exploration that is the develop dependable two-way streets of experts ahead of time, setting up a relationship that will later help the star producer complete critical tasks. Moreover, the stars and networks different from typical workers networks in 2 important respects. 1st, they maintain stronger engagement with the people in their networks, so these people responded more quickly and helpfully. As a result, the stars rarely spend time spinning their wheels going down blind alleys. Page 35

2nd, star performers networks were also more diverse. Average performer saw the world only from the standpoint of their job, in Pushing the same points. Stars on the other hand, had people in the networks with a more diverse set of work rules, so they could adopt the perspectives of customers, competitors, and managers. Because they could see the situation from a variety of viewpoints, they could develop better solutions to problems. Page 35

“What we found was that individuals who adopted an energetic, and gauging interaction style that create more interactive conversations ended up being more important to idea flow in the social network.… the most productive people in the world... are continually engaging with others in order to harvest new ideas, and this exploratory behavior creates better idea flow.”

“… Social learning only improves decision-making people have different individual information. So in situations when the outside information sources (for example, magazines, TV, radio) have become too similar, then groupthink becomes a real danger.” Page 36 and 37

“In summary, people act like idea processing machines combining individual thinking and social learning from the experiences of of others. Success depends greatly on the quality of your exploration and that in turn relies on the diversity and independence of your information and ideas sources.” Page 41 

Idea flow: chapter 3

“… We think that each stream of ideas is a swarm or collective intelligence, flowing through time with all the humans and learning from each other's experiences in order to jointly discover the patterns of preferences and habits of action that best suit the surrounding physical and social environment.” Page 46

This is counter to the way most modern Westerners understand themselves, which is as rational individuals, people who know what they want and who decide for themselves what actions to take in order to accomplish their goals. Could it be that our preferences and methods of action, the very things that define rationality, come from our community as much as from within ourselves? Page 46

Preferences: “… The amount of exposure to people possessing similar opinions accurately predicted both the students level of interest in the presidential race and their liberal conservative balance. This collective opinion affect was very clear: more exposure to similar views make the students more extreem in their own views. Page 50

“… We can consciously reason about which flow of ideas you want to swim in, but then exposure to those ideas will work to shape our habits and beliefs subconsciously. Page 51

“… 4 political views, shifted exposure to a different flow of ideas spending more time with a crowd that filled, will anyway that hardened beliefs and habits.” Page 51

“… Learning from surrounding example behaviors is much more efficient than learning solely from our own experiences. Mathematical models of learning in complex environments suggested the best strategy for learning to spend 90% of our efforts on exploration, that is finding and copying others who appear to be doing well. The remaining 10% should be spent on individual experimentation and thinking things through. “Pay 54

“In the end of the 1700s, philosophers began to declare that humans were rational individual. People were flattered by being recognizes individuals, and by being called rational, and the idea soon will wormed its way into the belief systems o nearly everyone in upper-class Western society. Despite resistance from church and state, this idea of rational individuality replace the assumption that truth only came from God and King. Over time, the ideas of rationality individualism change the entire belief system of Western intellectual society, and today it is doing the same to the belief systems of other cultures.

“… We are now coming to realize that human behavior is determined as much by social context as by rational thinking or individual desires. Rationality, as the term is used by economists, means that we know what we want and have to get. But I think that my research shows that both people's desires and their decisions about how to act our often, and perhaps typically, dominated by social network effects.

Recently, economists have moved toward the idea of bounded rationality, which means that we have biases and cognitive limitations that prevent us from realizing full rationality. The dependence on social interactions, however is not simply a bias or a cognitive limitation.… Social learning is an important method of enhancing individual decision-making. Similarly, we will see in the next chapter that social influences central to constructing the social norms that enable cooperative behavior. Our ability to survive and prosper is due to social learning in social influence at least as much as it is due individual rationality.

These data tell us that what we want and value, as well as how we choose to act or to obtain our desires, are a  constantly evolving property of interactions with other people. Our desires and practices are mostly based on what our peer community agrees is valuable rather than our individual biological drives or inborn morals.”

"Our ancestors understood that our culture and the habits of our society are social contracts, and that both depend primarily upon social learning. As a result, most of our public beliefs and habits are learned by observing the attitudes, actions, and outcomes of peers, rather than by logic or argument. Learning and reinforcing the social contract is what enables a group of people to ordinate their actions effectively.  " Page 61

"Even though today's society tends to glorify the individual, the vast majority of our decisions are shaped by common sense, the habits and beliefs we have in common with our peers, and these habits are shaped by interactions with other people. We learn common sense almost automatically, by observing and copying the common behaviors of your peers. It is through these collective preference and decision mechanisms that we come to automatically behave politely at parties, respectfully at work, and passively in public transit. It is the idea flow within a community that builds the intelligence that makes it successful." Page 61

Chapter 4: engagement: How can we all work together.

And Bob Kelly's Bell Stars study, in which you look at the difference between average and star performers within Bell laboratories, preachers found that the star performers incurred for workgroups to be a in exactly this sort of social voting manner. Average performers thought teamwork meant doing their part on the team. Star performers, however, saw things differently: they pushed everyone on the team toward joint ownership of goal setting, group commitments, work activities, schedules, and group accomplishments. Star performers promoted that is, synchronized, uniform idea flow within the team by making everyone feel a part of it, and try to reach a sufficient consensus so that everyone would willingly go along with new ideas. Page 63

Synchronization and uniformity of idea flow within a group is critical: when overwhelming majority seem ready to adopt a new idea, this convinces even the skeptics to go along. A surprising finding is that when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others—e.g., rowing together, dancing together—our bodies release endorphins, natural opiates that give a pleasant high every war for working together. [ritual]

Social pressure: "there is growing evidence of the power of engagement—direct, strong, positive interactions between people–is vital to promoting trustworthy, cooperative behavior." Page 65

“Standard economic incentives miss the mark because they frame people as individual, rational actors rather than as social creatures influenced by social ties.… By providing incentives aimed at people social networks rather than economic incentives information packets that are aimed at changing the behavior of individual people.” Page 66

Rather than to use individual market incentives or to provide additional information the social physics approach to getting everyone to cooperate is to use social network incentives rather than to use individual market incentives or to provide additional information. That is, we focus on changing the connections between people rather than focusing on getting people individually to change their behavior."

Conclusion: “engagement—repeating cooperative interactions—builds trust and increases the value of a relationship, which lays the groundwork for the social pressure needed to establish cooperative behaviors. In other words, engagement builds culture. Page 74

“Adam Smith argued that the social fabric created by the exchange of goods, ideas, gifts, and favors guided capitalism to create solutions for the good of the community.… Communities are made of social ties, and without the constraint of social pressure provided by social ties, capitalism can become predatory. Social physics tells us that we must include not only economic exchanges, but also exchanges of information, ideas, and the creation of social norms in order to more fully explain human behavior.” Page 75

“Adam Smith's description of "good” capitalism outlined an ideal situation. He could imagine of social engagement almost always balanced economic forces, because he lived in a smaller world: bourgeois residents in the city were more likely to know each other and constrained by similar social norms and pressure to be good citizens. But his was also in Europe in which the poor were invisible and the lack of engagement between the rich and poor removed the social constraints on exchanges between these groups. Famously, this gave rise to the horrors and abuses of the 1st industrial age. p76