I’ll Have What She’s Having by Mark Earls of Herd - Presented at the Insight Innovation eXchange North America 2013
Mark Earls’ 2011 book I’ll Have What She’s Having is a revolutionary new look into humanity’s social nature. In his presentation, he’ll be sharing the key ideas from his book, described in further detail below. 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.
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I’ll Have What She’s Having by Mark Earls of Herd - Presented at the Insight Innovation eXchange North America 2013
- 1. 11 Text search I’ll Have What She’s Having @herdmeister June 2013
- 2. 22 HEY HO LET’S GO!
- 4. “the most important influence on individual behaviour is the behaviour of others”* Source: UK Government Behavioural Insights Team Mid Term Review
- 5. I spy Homo Mimicus?
- 7. 7 Just how important is the space between? Just how important is the space between? 7 ...
- 9. Independent choice Copying The Church of Touchdown Jesus, Monroe, Ohio
- 10. Signature patterns in data Diffusion through a population by individuals discovering the superior qualities of the product independently of their peers Diffusion through a population by individuals mostly learning from each other either about the quality of the product or its social value Space betweenSpace within ...
- 11. 1111 Market-level patterns also help Space within Space between short-tail distribution long-tail distribution Few have a very low share Many items in tail with small share
- 14. 14 Copying Experts Copying PeersGuesswork Considered choice A simple map (rooted in data patterns) Few choices Many choices 14 ... Adapted from Bentley Earls O’Brien “I’ll have what she’s having” MIT Press 2011 Space betweenSpace within
- 15. 15 rapid turnover of popularity short-tail distribution Space within long-tail plot Adapted from Bentley Earls O’Brien “I’ll have what she’s having” MIT Press 2011 Few choices short-tail plot Many choices Space between slow turnover of popularity rapid turnover of popularity 15 Using patterns to build a map
- 16. 16 Few choices Many choices CopyingIndependent 31 1 Yes* Maybe No No
- 17. Sampling: social really is different
- 18. how are we connected?a. what happens in the space between us? b. The social research agenda how do things spread?c.
- 20. 2121 “Oh, to be at the beginning again knowing almost nothing” Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
- 21. 2231
Editor's Notes
- Good morning - delighted to be here Share with you a way of mapping human behaviour that seems to work well for lots of different behaviour change tasks: commercial-marketing, NGO/Charity and public policy. Not a panacea but we ’ ve found it really helps make the most of behaviour change
- Very useful for plotting different markets on: here ’ s some done recently... Thinking about each of these categories, where do you think they plot on this spectrum?
- News story and then social diffusion If you want to spread your thing, your idea, your brand, you need to worry less about the LH and more about the RH
- We ’ re not really interested in “ physics ” descriptions - precise, detailed (not least because the detail is elusive and slippery) Instead characterising behaviours in terms of social influence (Lo -Hi) And Directedness (lo-hi)
- The plain answer is no. Unless you know that the behaviour you ’ re studying really is independent and considered. Most of the rest of the map needs something other than individual-based methods.
- A good example of this is sampling: if the behaviour really is individual and independent, aggregating the results of individual interviews (qual or quant) to produce a population will be fine. But if it ’ s the result of social influence - IHWSH - then it will not be. Social really is different - that ’ s why we see those kind of patterns I showed a few mins ago. And the important piece is precisely what trad MR misses
- Some suggestions we probably know about...