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Social learning
In some ways nearly everyone is acquainted
with copying something they have seen, heard
or read about. The internet is full of this kind
of activity on Google, social networking sites
like Facebook, and blogs. How people copy
each other is also of extreme importance to
business. Retail markets, such as the fashion
industry, rely heavily on monitoring what people
buy. Instead of encouraging individuals to
make their own independent decisions about
what they wear, clothing companies attempt
to influence people’s behaviour in order to get
them to buy their products. If a celebrity is
seen wearing a pair of shoes, jacket or knickers
from a well-known brand, others will often do
the same. But it’s not always clear how and why
people make the choices they do or why they
copy certain things and not others. Why is it
that the name ‘Kristi’ was one of the top 100
baby names in the 1970s, but is now not even
in the top 1000? Despite a recording industry
dominated by digital music, why does vinyl
live on? How did the riots in London evoke
massive looting and vandalism across cities
throughout the UK? There is something about
how behaviour and ideas are socially learnt
through copying that may hold the answer.
Anthropologist Dr Alex Bentley and economist
Dr Paul Ormerod discovered something unique
about human behaviour when people were
presented with information about health
scares such as the avian influenza or ‘bird flu’
epidemic in 2005 and the H1N1 virus in 2009,
better known as ‘swine flu’. Their research
revealed that interest in health scares actually
spreads socially rather than through people
making actual physical contact with disease.
This of course doesn’t mean that all health
scares are solely driven socially, but it does
say something about how they spread rapidly
and can be managed.
Human behaviour, like other forms of animal
behaviour, is learnt socially. But what makes
humans unique is that they can imitate each
other socially like no other animal that has
come before them. Many kinds of animals
including birds and even fish have their own
kinds of ‘culture’, but none are as good as
humans in imitating each others’ behaviour.
“Humans are, first and foremost, social
creatures. In fact, our brains have actually
evolved to handle social relations, and to learn
from others rather than have to ‘re-invent the
wheel’ each time individually”, says Bentley.
In 2005, during the height of the bird flu
scare, President George W Bush delivered a
speech in the US warning people about the
spread of the bird flu virus. This may have been
the tipping point for public awareness of bird
flu as many people were already online and
searching Google for further information about
the disease. After Bush made his speech the
imitated searches on Google for bird flu rose
rapidly. The announcement made by a pivotal
political figure had led to a sudden exceptional
spike in web searches beyond the normal
envelope of change and became a new trend.
The internet reveals a number of interesting
things about how people copy each others’
behaviour, that along with other examples, have
been used to question older models scientists
have used to study human behaviour.
Time and time again we witness how focused
social learning by a few gets amplified as
copying by the masses”, says Bentley. The
internet has only amplified this form of social
copying and understanding how this behaviour
works may allow warnings about disease or
other hazards to be released more strategically.
While tipping point has become extremely
popular and social learning likely has something
to do with how its use has spread throughout
academia and the media alike, what might it
actually describe about the physical world?
The inventiveness of baby names in the US
has tripled since the early 1990s
(grey line – girls, black line – boys):
Many scientists are moving away from the
idea that individuals are rational, autonomous
agents, but instead are much more susceptible
to the behaviour of those around them, leading
them to be influenced socially in a variety of
different ways. “Social influence is a better
model than the ‘rational actor’ especially for
certain phenomena, such as how buzz words
propagate and how ideas spread; how the swine
flu scare became an epidemic; or even how
science makes its progress.
Lorenz attractors. Bifurcations occur when small changes in
a system lead to a sudden big change, causing the system to
divide into two or more.
Above: Bentley A and Ormerod P. ‘Accelerated innovation and increased
spatial diversity of US popular culture’. Advances in Complex Systems
(ACS). http://www.paulormerod.com/pdf/BentleyOrmerod_ACS.pdf