Tag: Adam Kucharski

💎 On why collective behaviour is so hard to predict

Pitts put it. ‘A one-man riot is a tantrum.’ So how does a riot grow from a single person? In 1978, Mark Granovetter published a now classic study looking at how trouble might take off. He suggested that people might have different thresholds for rioting: a radical person might riot regardless of what others were doing, whereas a conservative individual might only riot if many others were. As an example, Granovetter suggested we imagine 100 people hanging around in a square. One person has a threshold of 0, meaning they’ll riot (or tantrum) even if nobody else does; the next person has a threshold of 1, so they will only riot if at least one other person does; the next person has a threshold of 2, and so on, increasing by one each time. Granovetter pointed out that this situation would lead to an inevitable domino effect: the person with a 0 threshold would start rioting, triggering the person with a threshold of 1, which would trigger the person with a threshold of 2. This would continue until the entire crowd was rioting.

But what if the situation were slightly different? Say the person with a threshold of I had a threshold of 2. This time, the first person would start rioting, but there would be nobody else with a low enough threshold to be triggered. Although the crowds in each situation are near identical, the behaviour of one person could be the difference between a riot and a tantrum. Granovetter suggested personal thresholds could apply to other forms of collective behaviour too, from going on Strike leaving a social event.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 On the danger of poorly set targets

Metrics have even shaped literature. When Alexandre Dumas first wrote The Three Musketeers in serialised form, his publisher paid him by the line. Dumas therefore added the servant character Grimaud, who spoke in short sentences, to stretch out the text (then killed him off when the publisher said that short lines didn’t count).

Relying on measurements like clicks or likes can give a misleading impression of how people are truly behaving. During 2007–8, over 1.1 million people joined the “Save Darfur’ cause on Facebook, which aimed to raise money and attention in response to the conflict in Sudan. A few of the new members donated and recruited others, but most did nothing. Of the people who joined, only 28 per cent recruited someone else, and a mere 0.2 per cent donated.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models

The second kind of response is at the other extreme. Rather than ignore results, people may have too much faith in them. Opaque and difficult is seen as a good thing. I’ve often heard people suggest that a piece of maths is brilliant because nobody can understand it. In their view, complicated means clever. According to statistician George Box, it’s not just observers who can be seduced by mathematical analysis. “Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models,’ he supposedly once said.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 On the downside of working from home (the spread of new ideas from weak ties)

In the 1970s, sociologist Mark Granovetter suggested that information could spread further through acquaintances than through close friends. This was because friends would often have multiple links in common, making most transmission redundant. ‘If one tells a rumor to all his close friends, and they do likewise, many will hear the rumor a second and third time, since those linked by strong ties tend to share friends.’ He referred to the importance of acquaintances as the ‘strength of weak ties’: if you want access to new information, you may be more likely to get it through a casual contact than a close friend.’

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski