I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

✍ Scribed by Alex Bentley, Mark Earls, Michael J. O'Brien

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 160
• Series: Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover ......Page 1
Contents ......Page 6
Foreword ......Page 8
Preface: In Katz’s Deli ......Page 10
1 Out of the Trees ......Page 15
Playboy and the Pleistocene ......Page 17
The Forest for the Trees: the Social Side of Things ......Page 22
Organizing Our Thinking As Trees ......Page 25
2 Rules of the Game ......Page 29
3 Copying Brain, Social Mind ......Page 39
More Really Is Different ......Page 41
Why Copy? ......Page 43
The Social Brain: Organized In Trees ......Page 46
The Social Mind and Collective Memory ......Page 49
4 Social Learning, En Masse ......Page 55
Models of Social Diffusion ......Page 58
Anyone for “less Nuanced”? ......Page 62
Why “cold Fusion” Is Different ......Page 65
The Idea and the Virus ......Page 69
Heard That Name Before? ......Page 71
Traditions ......Page 76
5 Cascades ......Page 81
Unintended Cascades ......Page 82
“impact” Cascades ......Page 84
Not Solid Ground ......Page 85
Things Get Complex ......Page 87
When Power Laws Cascaded ......Page 90
Avalanches and Wildfires ......Page 92
Cascades In Highly Connected Networks ......Page 95
Trees, Again ......Page 97
Learning From Cascades ......Page 99
6 When In Doubt, Copy ......Page 101
Extending the Game ......Page 104
Long Tails ......Page 105
Copycats ......Page 108
How Are People Copying? ......Page 119
7 Mapping Collective Behavior ......Page 125
A Map With Four Regions ......Page 128
The Age of “What She’s Having”......Page 137
Back In the Deli ......Page 140
Bibliography ......Page 143
Index ......Page 155