Since the time of ancient Greece, political scientists and campaign managers alike have been studying society for clues on how political attitudes and behaviors are shaped. But could the nature of our politics be less about society and more about us? Could it all come down to biology?

Inheritance

We inherit many attributes from our parents like height, eye color and even some behaviors like altruism. But it’s only in the last 15 years that the concept has emerged that our genes are helping shape complex behaviors like our political nature.

Of course even simple things like our height aren’t as straightforward as pure genetics – a poor diet during childhood or by your mother while you are in the womb will lower your height below your theoretical genetic maximum. And so it is with our social and political leanings, a mix of inheritance and environmental influences underlies everything about us.

Social attitudes like shyness, compassion, altruism and attitudes towards risk all have well-established biological bases in neuronal circuitry, and hence have very heritable patterns. That these traits are part and parcel of our political conduct and can be influenced by our genes certainly points to a role for genetics, but the big question is why? Why would we evolve these traits? Why have we developed such a complex concept as politics?

Many of these attributes aren’t actually unique to humans. Our fellow primates are also well equipped to manage complex social interactions and have cognitive abilities to solve technical problems. But this doesn’t mean that learning a complex social behavior like politics is the same as learning how to find food and build shelter.

And this where is the work of two political scientists, Fowler and Schreiber, highlight an interesting concept: That there is a network of brain activity that differs between people who are knowledgeable and naïve about politics.

Politics on the brain

People who were either Democrats, Republicans or politically naïve were asked to answer a series of questions about national politics while being examined by fMRI. In each case the neuronal activity of two particular brain regions varied – the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial parietal cortex. However it was only Democrats and republicans that showed increased activity here while the politically naïve people actually experienced a decrease in activity below normal.

The key conundrum that this data solves is that these regions of the brain are pretty active most of the time and actually switch off when doing more technical problem solving type tasks. It’s conundrum because it takes an awful lot of energy to keep neurons firing and it’s not an evolutionary advantage to go wasting precious calories when you don’t need to.

But apart from being even more active when pundits are asked about politics, these regions have been previously linked to times when we are making moral judgments or observing social interactions. The implication is that political behavior is a form of social cognition. Political situations require that we consider the mental states of others and assess the social and emotional environment around us – exactly what these brain regions are great at. And when the politically naïve are forced to consider these issues they approach the questions like they were technical problems and deactivate these brain regions.

So now we have an idea about what this neural network does, but considering it is so energetically costly to operate why did we evolve it?

Cooperation and trust

We’ve all heard the quote “Survival of the fittest” as the neat catchall summary of the theory of evolution but how do we explain altruism where an individual reduces their “fitness” to enhance the survival of others? This is one of the big questions in terms of evolutionary biology.

This goes broader than the level of the individual – politics and political groups are merely more sophisticated examples of coordinated mass behavior where the actions of any one individual campaign member does not affect the outcome of an election.

We are now entering the realms of evolutionary speculation, but it is clear from an observational point of view that a coordinated group of people should be able to out-compete a lone individual. And by extension, a large coordinated group can outcompete a smaller coordinated group. Hence it is advantageous for otherwise fit individuals to assist the less fit members of their group.

The sum of its parts

Our genes regulate our neurons and our neurons coalesce to form our brain so it is not surprising to find that biology can impact our social and political behavior. But biology is fuzzy by nature. We can never point to a particular clump of neurons or genes and say “This makes a George Bush or an Obama”.

While I’m a staunch neuroscientist, every discipline has its limitations. The really huge discoveries in this area actually still lie ahead of us, at the intersection of neuroscience and political science.

In the meantime there’s still heaps to discover by getting instant Email or RSS updates here at Very Evolved.

Original image by nathangibbs remixed by Patrick

Fowler, J., & Schreiber, D. (2008). Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature Science, 322 (5903), 912-914 DOI: 10.1126/science.1158188

Envy and schadenfreude

Much has been made in the media recently of Rush Limbaugh’s wish for President Obama to fail. Despite the ideological differences about the best way to fix the economy, clearly it’s not advantageous for Rush or any other citizen of the USA to see the nation collapse into a Mad Max thunderdome style economy.

A simple explanation is to brush this off as mere politics, but Rush’s attitude highlights a deeper mystery about how our brains are wired and why this seemingly negative trait exists in human nature. New work published in the journal Science this month helps shed light on why.

On the face of it, both envy and schadenfreude seem so illogical that it’s hard to know why they exist at all. Where is the evolutionary advantage in feeling painful emotions because a fellow Stone Age tribe member has a bigger club than you? Similarly, why should seeing them lose their possessions make you feel good?

Neither of these alone increases your ability to survive or in a broader sense – the survival of the tribe.

Both of these aspects of human nature aren’t new and even the ancient Greeks studied the envy despite the lack of fMRI scanners available. Essentially we can sum up our reactions in the face of envy as follows: we experience envy because we feel we deserve those possessions or positions held by others. Similarly when someone is deprived of their possessions and stature it can evoke sympathy and empathy which I’ve discussed before in relation to Facebook.

But if misfortune strikes those you don’t care for and you like it, then that’s schadenfreude. If you are happy to see Bernie Madoff go to jail then you know what I mean.

Pleasure and Pain

The neural networks regulating pleasure and pain have been known for some time now and are highlighted in the graphic below. Without getting into much science-speak we can summarize the mechanisms pretty easily.

Pleasure is mediated by the reward circuitry that runs on the neurotransmitter dopamine and the whole system is activated in response to pleasing activities. Traditionally these are things that directly relate to survival – food and sex. But it’s also a key player in the rewarding effects of drug use like heroin.

Pain is managed by a different but related set of brain regions, again with evolutionary survival advantages. It’s essential to be able to feel pain when you cut yourself and just as important to locate the source of the pain – you don’t want to keep walking on an injured leg and exacerbate the damage.

The surprising finding in the current study was that feeling envy at someone else’s success activated the same pain systems as if you had physically injured yourself. Similarly the feeling of schadenfreude at a rival’s failure activated the same neural mechanism that governs our feelings of pleasure from a lovely meal, giving to charity, or a hit of opiates.

My social life is causing me pain

Most of us already describe being shamed and humiliated as painful and doing a good deed as rewarding, but this is actually true on a neuronal level – the neuronal responses to these abstract social situations are given equal billing with physical responses. But why might this be the case?

Basic drives and emotions have been a great motivator to do things that enhance our survival since the dawn of man. Being hungry is uncomfortable so you seek out food. Being wet compels us to seek shelter. Each pain is a call to action to remedy the situation.

Extending this to the current findings implies that social discomforts played as an important role to survival as physical ones.

Thinks get a bit murkier from here, as it’s clear why we need food and shelter but why does the brain treat these pains the same as social ones like envy? One prominent theory says it’s all about maintaining connections to the social group, and hence better co-ordination amongst large numbers of people.

Distribution of duties like hunting and infant care giving amongst a group requires considerable co-ordination. To make such a system work we need to have a social system to police it.  If people are fair and charitable then the group as a whole is more likely to survive and hence the activation of the pleasure network.
Conversely, group members that are not co-operating or not acting fairly cause social pain to others and are then more likely to be ostracized and consequently their individual chances of survival go way down.

Dissecting schadenfreude and envy

We humans are unique in that we are self-aware. Unfortunately with this comes the baggage of automatically measuring our self against those around us.

Discomfort at others doing better than us can be resolved either by ceasing to care about it or improving our performance. Easier said than done naturally, so the third option becomes malice and ill will or actions to remove the advantages of those doing well to bring them down to our level.
From a more dispassionate, and economic point of view, envy is a social motivator to be productive to raise the levels of group performance and to compete with others – the same way two species might fight for limited resources in an evolutionary race.
When your competition falters and their advantages are reduced, the societal discomfort is reduced and a feeling of pleasure can take hold. Just like eating a great meal on an empty stomach it’s an evolutionary indicator that you’re doing something right that’s increased your ability to survive.

The flipside of this is that people who have higher levels of pain and conflict are more likely to have very strong feelings of pleasure when relived from this pain. I guess this means that means that when Rush Limbaugh says he wants the government to collapse it’s just his way of self-medicating. In his case, it’s just a pity for the rest of us that schadenfreude doesn’t come in pill form.

Rumor has it that subscribing to the Email or RSS updates on VeryEvolved is a great cure for envy.

Your brain is a social brain. It can tell what your friends are thinking, how they feel and it can even predict the future. It’s this intimate connection to others that lets us work together to build everything from sports teams to civilizations. But this is our social brain in the physical world. What happens when we move online?

Because we know how our brain works in social situations we can see that the whole beautiful system is reduced to a crude shadow by social networks like Facebook. But why does it all go wrong?

Lets start by taking a tour through our social brain and how it works.

I’ve never met you, but I know your type

The first way the social brain organizes information about individuals is by considering what category it can lump them into. Tribe, sex, race, job, politics. It doesn’t matter what the grouping is, as long as our brain can categorize them into some class its experienced before.

Voila! We’ve just labeled someone with a stereotype.

From an evolutionary perspective we need to be able to make a quick and dirty quick judgment to see if a stranger will affect our survival. Strangers compete with us for food and resources, and may even threaten us physically. The key brain region involved here is the amygdala, it deals with just about everything to do with value judgments, both positive and negative. Fear, desire, danger, food and sex.

Since we’re not in the Stone Age, stereotyping is rarely the difference between life and death for us, but it remains as a handy shortcut when we don’t have enough detailed information about someone new.

Let’s get to know each other

Being social animals we can’t leave our interactions with others at the stereotype level. When we move closer socially, crude groupings just don’t cut it. We now switch to the second way our brain process social information; People as individuals.

1) Direct experience. This by far the most common way of learning and doesn’t need a lot of explanation. The main nugget of information we assess with one-on-one interaction is measuring the trust and reciprocity people are capable of.

2) Observation. Here we learn the reputation of individuals through observing their interactions with others. A neat example of why this is important to us is the phenomenon of altruistic third party punishment. This is where a third person observing an economic transaction will willingly punish someone they see being unfair, even if they are not involved in the situation.

3) Learning about individuals from others. The previous two points apply equally well to other primate species, but learning the reputation of an individual from talking to other people is uniquely human. It’s the foundations of gossip, and moving from a tribe size of 150 to millions.

But what if you know someone personally and you also know about the group they’re from? How does your brain decide which information to rely on – especially if the two views are opposing? In what is a vote of confidence for a tolerant society, personal information trumps the crude sketch of stereotypes. Our social brain just loves gathering more detailed information and isn’t satisfied to leave it at stereotypes given the opportunity.

So stereotypes and personal interaction are the two basic ways we collect information about people. But it’s what happens next that is truly amazing. Our social brain begins to see into the minds of those around us.

I know what you’re doing

Decoding social signals is a complex dance of observation and interpretation. But for our social brain it’s so automatic that you don’t even notice it. In fact it’s so adept with social cues, that it’s constantly predicting the future outcome of others actions. When we observe others in motion we automatically calculate what happens next. If you’re watching a basket ball game and you see a free throw in action, a lot of the time you can tell if the ball will go in only moments after it’s left the hands of the shooter.

While this is a useful way for our brains to learn physics and throwing spears at woolly mammoths, it has deeper implications for social interactions. And it’s all due to one region of your brain called the superior temporal sulcus (STS). We not only predict what will happen but also assign intent to peoples actions. Why did they do that? What is their goal?

A great example of this is a study where researchers asked people to pick up a variety of different boxes. They were all told how much the boxes weighed, but on rare occasions they were misinformed and the box was either lighter or heavier than expected. The entire process was recorded and then shown to a different group of people.

The brains of this group were monitored and it was revealed that the levels of activity in the STS changed when determining if the actions were intentional or unintentional. Even when the weight difference wasn’t great, the subtle postures before and after picking up the box were enough to let us peer into the minds of others and see what they were thinking before and after picking up the odd box.

While simplistic, this experiment demonstrates how finely tuned our brain is at determining if actions are intentional. This of course is an essential skill in all social interactions to determine if someone’s actions are genuine and not merely faked.

I feel your pain

We have an automatic tendency to share others experiences, to empathize with them. The most obvious example is yawning. If you see someone yawn you yourself are quite likely to yawn. Yawning is so contagious that since I’ve written the word yawn six times now it’s a good bet that yawning has broken out amongst a lot of you reading this. I certainly yawned a lot writing it.

It’s likely that empathy and shared experience is due to an amazing set of circuits in our social brain called mirror neurons. These nerve cells respond to the perceived experiences of others, and mirror the effect by activating similar regions of our own brain. If you see someone wince when they hit their thumb with a hammer, we also react and even pull our hand away. For better or worse, the entire reality TV genre couldn’t exist without mirror neurons, making us flinch when someone gets hit or eats something disgusting.

We also see more subtle examples of empathy all around us under the guise of body language, and the tendency to mimic others we have a connection to.

Empathy only goes so far though. If our knowledge about an individual and the group they belong to grows and we deem them untrustworthy, the shared response to their experiences is diminished. In fact when it comes to feeling their pain, the opposite may even be true. In one study observers of a trading game saw that one individual broke the trust of the group by “cheating” and that they were also in pain. This actually activated the striatum of the observers, a region associated with pleasure and reward instead of the mirror system.

I see what you mean

A key part of empathy is being able to see things from another person’s perspective. But the reverse isn’t true: you can understand someone else’s perspective without feeling what they do. The prefrontal cortex does the heavy lifting here, away from the amygdala and those messy emotions.

Strangely enough, one thing that seems to automatically trigger mental perspective taking is cartoons. Even with something as simple as XKCD, it’s is easy to assign emotions and intentions of movement to the characters, and it’s even easier when cartoons are animated.

Our almost unlimited capacity for abstract concepts allows us to antropormorphize these objects into something resembling human social behavior. It’s also the reason nudges and virtual gifts on Facebook are so popular – it’s a proxy for our lack of real social information.

Information flow is not a one-way street

So what’s the purpose of collecting and calculating all his information about other people? Why do you care where they’re walking to, what they’re thinking about, and what they intend to do?
The machinery of the social brain in all it’s guises is concerned with only one goal: better communication with others. But not only do we need to know what others are thinking, it’s also just as important for us to communicate our mental state, feelings and trustworthiness.

A staggering sense of loss

The brain has developed and devoted considerable resources to predicting social situations and even though you may not be consciously aware, it’s very good at making predictions. The brain still makes mistakes though (the crude group stereotype) but like forecasting the weather, the more detailed information the brain has, the more accurate the predictions get.

This is why interfaces like Facebook are but a shadow of true social interaction. Static pictures, text based hugs and instant messaging omits all the nuances of normal interaction. We are hard wired to gather information at multiple levels, which just aren’t possible with the stunted interfaces of online communities like Facebook.

In the first section of this article I discussed how we judge an individual by the groups they fall into, it’s crude but the only option for our brain to grab onto when information is limited. Our knowledge of individuals only improves with more nuanced and more detailed exposure. Social networks like Facebook have turned this information flow into reverse, where group association is the strongest measure of an individual and observation of personal behavior is absent. Needless to say that determining intention from actions is all but impossible.

Empathy and “other people’s perspective” are also reduced to crude caricatures that can’t move beyond someone typing, “I am sad” and buying a virtual bouquet of flowers.

The fallout from understanding the neuroscience of the social brain is that we don’t have 500 friends on Facebook. Indeed, we ourselves are no more than a stereotypical member of a group of 500.

But as we discussed, the social brain has an automatic and strong desire for information about other people. This in part, explains the multi-million dollar Facebook application industry, by monetizing our desire to connect and understand others and to let them know we are the same. A quick glance at the recently popular Facebook apps page reveals that nearly all of them transport information about yourself to others and vice versa. Not toys, not amusing games, but communication tools. But you can’t substitute the intricacies of human interaction with trinkets such as virtual poking, and charging money for virtual gifts.

In this way, tapping into our social brain and our wallets is as insidious as charging a blind person for glasses. It cannot hope to replicate the cues our social brain evolved to look for.

Facebook does serve a purpose though, it’s a communication tool – like a cell phone. But every tool has its limitations. You don’t buy a cell phone because it’s as good as getting a hug from your friends.

Don’t stop using Facebook, just don’t forget to keep your social brain active in the area were it works brilliantly – the physical world. Online networks will always have a place in our communication tool box, but to call Facebook a social network is to say the Sesame Street coloring book has the same emotional impact as Shakespeare.

Since the human brain is a social brain, so you already know you won’t find me on Facebook, but you can still make a great connection when you subscribe to the RSS or Email updates.

original image by jmsmytase remixed by Patrick

Back in September of 07 Mark Earls asked his readers why do you think that crocs, (the brightly colored plastic shoes) had become so popular? How did this viral trend spread? The answers to seemingly simple question reveal a lot about how the human brain works and how ideas spread between people without you even knowing it.

As you might expect, the answers from people who had bought them ranged from comfort through to “they are available in nice colors”. But are these really the thoughts that go through your mind before you buy these things? Is this why we decide in the first place?

Rationalizations

The truth is that more often than not you can’t pinpoint exactly why you buy something. But when asked you can certainly come up with an explanation of why you did. In fact our brain has to work this way to maintain the illusion of understanding the world. It would be very jarring to our sense of self and our linear logical view of the world if we couldn’t explain our actions – our Stone Age ancestors certainly didn’t want to be paralyzed into inaction by the appearance of cause not following effect. The brain solves this problem quite neatly by sometimes constructing the answers to these questions post-event.

• Why did I buy those crocs?

• Why did I decide to submit that article to stumble upon?

• Why did I repeat that one particular chant at the rock concert?

The decision making process to do any of these things is incredibly complex. How many times have you seen that ad on TV? Are the colors ones that have historically appealed to me? Are other people around you doing the same thing? What will others think of me if I wear those shoes?

It’s this last, hardest to measure point, that is the most important part to consider for getting an idea to go viral. Advertisements can fade into the background but are easy to notice if we wish. They can also be easy to measure from a historical perspective after an idea has gone viral. What’s much much harder to examine is the crowd behavior and dynamic flow of information that connects us all. Our social interactions and herd behavior is so prevalent that we don’t even see it anymore, and we certainly can’t go back and examine every small effect that added up to the final result of an idea going viral.

How things go viral

So we know decision making in social situations is complex but it goes some of the way to explaining why things go viral. But not how. The best examinations of how viral ideas spread are dissections of past events; like an archeologist describing the rise and fall of ancient Rome. For example Leo’s internet marking blog has a particularly good dissection of viral events from a social media perspective, and Malcolm Gladwell from a more general marketing perspective.

But for now let’s broadly define viral as something that’s reached enough penetrance in a crowd that it’s reached a critical mass from where it can touch most members of the crowd directly.

That’s really a no brainer, but how do we get to that point?

Influencers

Malcolm Gladwell examines the “critical mass of an idea” in his book The Tipping Point. Overall it’s an interesting explanation of how information moves through crowds and things go viral. There is much emphasis on influencers or super influencers in getting something to go viral; someone with a lot of reach or readers already can promote an idea and really enhance its chances of getting spread further. Bingo! The idea goes viral. No rocket science here -  you are basically starting out very near critical mass already.

But of all the posts that reach the front page of Digg and become popular on StumbleUpon, how many of those do you think have followed this model?

Not as many as you might think. It’s an attractive model for Internet marketers (and sales people in general) because it’s easy to understand and presents a clear plan to copy to make something viral. Find a big Digg or StumbleUpon user and persuade them to promote your link. It’s the same model that’s been used for decades and you see it on TV every time a celebrity shills an otherwise generic perfume.

But if the super influencer is actually an anomaly amongst all the popular stories on Digg then how does viral information flow through crowds most of the time? I’ve touched upon this briefly in my previous post in crowd science follow the herd with the rock concert example. The crowd at a rock concert or a crowd at a sports arena is a great model for chaotic information flow between people, where chants and Mexican waves seem to start from out of nowhere and become popular. No super influencers here – the extroverts in the crowd have no reputation to preceded them.

What we see here is that information flowing through the crowd is much more chaotic, harder to predict. It’s also harder to see a rising trend until it has overtaken us, like the rise of crocs. What we really need is a set of principles that work in this chaotic flow of information to spread our ideas – the dream of marketers and bloggers alike: how to make something go viral.

Because we are entering a chaotic system we can never guarantee success for every viral campaign – there is always that element of unpredictability that can throw off our calculations, just like predicting the weather can be pretty much right a lot of the time but never always.

But to successfully deal with a chaotic system like human crowd behavior we need to discard the old ideas, the “top 10 tips” lists of viral marketing and instead focus on the one thing that’s essential for a viral idea.

The currency of Attention

You may follow the traditional approach and actually reach your super influencer, and they may promote your idea. But even this isn’t enough for it to go viral. In effect you have only connected to one person. If your idea can’t connect to the thousand other minds out there, then no virality for you.

So why does one human brain take your idea and then desire to pass it along to another human brain? The details of this transaction will change depending on if you are selling Pepsi on the street or your blog post on the internet, but there is one universal constant. Attention.

Attention is a currency and people spend it like money. Consider this – What happens if you give bad financial advice to your friends?

If you recommend the purchase of a meal at a specific restaurant, and it turns out to be terrible, then there is a backlash where your friend won’t “spend” any more attention on your recommendations. Extrapolating this out to the community at large, if no one listens to you – then it’s the same as if you never said anything in the first place.

The long-term consequences of giving bad advice to your friends are huge.

This is the same transaction that takes place when reading anything on the internet. If you’re writing a blog post step back and look at it. It may very well be good enough to entertain an individual person, but is it good enough for that person to want to ask their friends to spend their attention cash on it?

You should not be writing an article to just be helpful to the end user. It’s much more than that. You want your article or product to be one that your customers need to invest others attention in.
Your readers should feel like they have something to gain from passing along your article to their friends. They are your co-authors, reaping the benefits of your words, by being able to say, “I found that”.

People should feel like classical explorers, sailing across oceans of web pages, striving for unknown shores. And then they find your idea. It’s unique, it’s attention grabbing, and it’s theirs to grab and return home with like victorious conquerors!

The consequences of giving great advice to your friends are huge.

Concentrate on the currency of attention when crafting your work and you be closer to the next big thing. It’s attention that’s the essence of going viral, it’s the foundation of the connection between you and your audience, and your audience members to each other. If you have your own experiences of gaining the attention of others and going viral, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below. After all, I want to connect to you too.

If you want to follow the rest of the herd here at VE then subscribe to our RSS or Email updates. And for the record – I don’t own any crocs……. yet.

Original image by kaibara87 remixed by Patrick

Humans are social animals. We tend to gather together in crowds in the physical world and now more often than ever, online. A crowd is joined by common interests like a rock concert, or staving off boredom on Digg and StumbleUpon. But how does behavior and information flow through the crowd? Why is it that we all chant the same thing at that concert, and also end up reading the same story on Digg? Most importantly: How can we spread our message through the online crowd?

Traditional crowd behavior and the new digital herd

Most of the studies we have on human crowd behavior are pretty outdated. While people haven’t really changed in their nature, the medium has. No longer is a crowd limited to a gathering of people together at the same time at a physical location. Now you can be separated in time and space and be a member of several crowds at once, with gatherings around Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon just to name some of the biggest players.

Make no mistake though; Digg and StumbleUpon are crowds, not communities or tribes no matter what the marketing gurus tell you. They lack central leadership or even a common purpose. Thinking of it as a herd or crowd much better explains the organization of these online gatherings and the dynamic flow of stories and ideas through them.

But online crowds are not as free flowing as you might think. At a rock concert you can yell, push, throw, dance see, hear and feel. Online crowds have only limited channels open – short descriptions of an article, comments, thumbs up, and votes. The flow of information and attention is artificially crippled compared to the physical world, limiting the type and amount of contact you have with your fellow grazers in the herd.

If you constrain the channels of interaction, like Digg and StumbleUpon do, then you constrain normal crowd behavior. What happens when behaviors get constrained and how this affects how ideas spread through the crowd is a tough one to study. What we can do though is look at how online crowds behave thorough what we know about traditional, physical crowd behavior and update it for a more modern definition.

With this we can then come up with a strategy to help spread our stories and ideas throughout these online crowds.

What herd behavior is not – Crowd sourcing

It’s worth taking a moment here to dispel a common misconception about what the dynamics of crowd behavior is not – Crowd sourcing.

Crowd sourcing and mining “the wisdom of the crowd” are merely modern incarnations of out sourcing, abeit on a mammoth scale. Wikipedia is perhaps the most visible example, where it is the cumulative contributions of large numbers of people that shape the final content. Solutions to problems emerge from individuals and the group sorts through all the options until the “best” answers are promoted.

Despite the crowd label being applied to “crowd sourcing”, this is not a model of how information and behavior flows through crowds, nor does it tell us why some ideas emerge and become popular over competing ideas. This is because we can’t really describe the people gathered here as a crowd, and herd behavior does not apply. Each Wikipedia editor may only propagate their ideas and gain attention through the audience by modifying the main article page (the discussion page notwithstanding).

This amounts to a more linear flow of information, analogous to each person at a rock concert taking turns to yell out something different, then everyone deciding which one was the catchiest, and then using that as the chant. It’s not dynamic at all like a real crowd.

There are variations on this of course, where crowd sourcing information flow is more dynamic. Companies like Vanno are using a hybrid approach to try and crowd source the reputation of companies – something that’s inherently dynamic and subject to opinions and behaviors flowing through crowds. Take devotion to and pushback against Apple for instance with the introduction of the first iPhone at a high price point, and it’s rapid price cut that left a lot of previous fans dismayed.

If this hybrid approach to crowd behavior and crowd sourcing works, then not only will you be able to see the most “popular” companies like a story on Digg, but also have a mechanism to follow the propagation of a idea or behavior through the crowd over time to find out exactly how they became popular or unpopular.

But now we need a model of how an idea can move through a crowd and become common enough to be popular.

You are all individuals. Now follow me.

Dr Alex Bentley and Mark Earls have championed a new way of thinking about how something gains the attention of the crowd; with the principle of Pull not push. Pulling an idea through the crowd involves presentation followed by random copying by the crowd members until it spreads far enough to become common. From Mark’s marketing perspective, this differs greatly from pushing ideas through the crowd like traditional advertising where it’s common to use celebrities to shill a product.

The same seems to hold true with the new dynamics of online crowds, where stories that become popular are hard to predict and seem to spread via random copying by other Digg/Stumble members.

Pushing can also occur somewhat in the online crowds, with very influential members appearing on Digg and StumbleUpon championing articles and speeding up the spread of the article. But just like celebrity endorsements they do not guarantee success.

Copying those around you has a certain appeal from an evolutionary perspective – it’s much easier for one Stone Age man to invent fire and have everyone else just copy how they did it, instead of independently inventing it every time. Copying what others are doing then confers a great survival advantage and may even explain our tendency to gossip. It is arguable then that our ability to learn/copy is an even greater contributor to our survival than our ability to create. The key requirement here though is that successful ideas and behaviors get copied and passed through the herd, leading to better survival, and that disadvantageous ideas do not get copied.

However there is a third category which contains even more ideas/behaviors than those that are advantageous or disadvantageous and it’s the category that almost everything you’ve ever seen on the internet falls into: Neutral effect. Those stories that fly through Digg and StumbleUpon vying for your eyeballs, begging you to copy them, fall firmly into this category. Like our Stone Age ancestors trying out thousands of different ways of making fire, as long as it didn’t kill you then it doesn’t hurt your chances of survival either.

OK, so articles on social media may not necessarily helpful, but they certainly aren’t harmful, so why do some make it to the front page of Digg and not others? Well the random copying of an idea in the online world requires one more factor for success: the transfer of attention from one crowd member to another.

Attention is a currency and funds are limited

When a story travels through a social network, it is not just the transfer of information that’s happening – as traditional models would have it. That’s way too abstract of a concept for the brain to really latch onto to explain why you would want to pass something on or vote it up or down.

We should instead think that a behavior or story traveling through the crowd as a transfer of attention. Take for example the catchy chant at a rock concert. When one person shouts it out, the people within earshot may pay attention to it and decide to copy it, leading to a cascade spreading throughout the crowd until the majority of people are in sync. The idea has gained attention and the individual members copy the behavior gaining the attention of more of the crowd.

The great myth about spreading your idea is that the transfer of a story or behavior between people happens because the idea has value. Take for example the rock concert analogy above. If the crowd has begun to chant, then an individual within the crowd may yell out an even catchier or wittier chant, one that could be said to have greater value than the one currently propagating. But because the transfer of attention from one person to another has already taken place on the first chant, it is very difficult for the second to gain ground and rise to become dominant, even if it is much more “valuable”.

You can see numerous examples of this on Digg and StumbleUpon everyday, where the progress of an article towards the front page is somewhat unpredictable, but as attention grows then the faster the article spreads, and the less likely another article will spread through the same group of users at the same time.

This is independent of the perceived value of either article. Which is why what you’re reading now can be equal in value to a picture of cat with a funny expression on its face (The subject of my next article: “I can haz newro-zience??”).

How to spread your idea through online crowds

So how can we use this knowledge of crowd behavior to spread our message?

1) Behavior emerges from within the herd. Unless you are already the focus of the crowd, like the band playing at the rock concert, then behavior and ideas must emerge from within the crowd. This may then seem like obvious advice but you need to spread your idea from within the crowd you are trying to get attention from. For example you and the readers of your website need to be part of the crowd that normally uses, Digg or StumbleUpon. If you’re a big faceless corporation yelling it’s ideas in our direction you are not part of the crowd. A good example would be the effective campains of Apple being seen as “one of us” and Microsoft as, not necessarily hated, but merely an ambivalent outside entity.

2) Pull don’t Push. It’s almost impossible to force a crowd to do something it doesn’t want to do. To spread your idea/behavior you need to present it as something worthy of attention. The value of your idea might appear independent from the attention it musters, but the perception of value is essential. Your article may even be the most brilliant one in the world, but unless you can communicate this, then why will a member of the crowd spend an ounce of attention showing it to someone else? You need your message to sell itself – you won’t ever contact every member of the crowd, you need to start something that people want to spend their attention on and that would be willing to ask others to spend attention on. There’s no getting around it – you need others to pull your idea for you. Anything else is just pushing.

3) Attention is currency. Attention is a finite resource, once the herd has begun to follow a behavior or idea then the odds of your idea going widespread with the same members is low. Most people just won’t Digg or Stumble more than one story a day, if that. This is largely out of your control, but it’s an odds game. Timing the presentation of your idea and spreading it over time will increase your chances of getting the attention of the crowd, but it’s something that will need to be refined in every case.

The dynamic nature of crowds means that the best we can do now is to present this general strategy – the exact steps, timing and presentation is going to vary depending if you are pulling your article, Pepsi, or your company logo through the herd. Our knowledge of crowd behavior is still developing and the online crowd science even more so. Think of this as an imperfect science, that is still more fine art than fine engineering.

The implications of modeling human herd behavior are huge though. If you could absolutely answer the question of what will be popular on Digg next Wednesday, you would also have yourself a formula that predicts human behavior on the stock market. But for now we will just have to live with the random copying of the herd and concentrate on building something that is worthy of attention.

If you believe I have transferred some attention to you my fellow herd member, I’ll invite you to pull it through the crowd by using the buttons below. Or if you have already used up your attention quota, to subscribe to the RSS and Email updates and graze with the herd here at VE.

Original image by tricky remixed by Patrick