How a stag do demonstrated a unique psychological experiment

Academic psychologists must have great fun designing experiments, particularly ones involving alcohol. There must be occasions, though, when practical and ethical considerations make experiments impossible. I wonder if this anecdote could have been conducted under experimental conditions?

A good friend of mine was best man at a stag do a few months ago. As is traditional, he racked his brains trying to think of ways to embarrass the stag, whilst getting him as drunk as possible in the shortest possible time. His idea was a work of genius. The best man later confided that he had no idea at the time whether it would work - if it didn't, the joke would have been on him - but as it turned out, it's a piece of experimental psychology worthy of any journal.

The lads had hired a house and, all being heavy drinkers, decided to do something familiar from most of our student days: a "centurion". For the uninitiated, a centurion consists of drinking 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes. The actual volume of alcohol consumed is substantial without being outrageous; it's about 6 pints, but what gets you hammered isn't so much the quantity consumed as the mechanical regularity of the drinking. One must drink a shot on the minute, every minute, for over an hour and a half. Inevitably casualties occur and vomiting after 60ish shots is perfectly respectable (I've known people to be sick on less than half that). An ideal icebreaker for the start of the stag do: relive old student days and get the whole party battered at the same time.

This was a centurion with a simple twist: whilst everyone else would plough on as normal, unbeknownst to him, the stag was fed non-alcoholic lager.

The implied reverse psychology is brilliant. Normally at a stag do, the main man would expect to get screwed over. This guy can handle his drink and fully expected to be given "dirty pints" and other horrors over the course of the weekend. His expectation was to be the drunkest member of the party. Not the other way around.

100 minutes later, a dozen battered lads staggered around the room. Several had hurled into the toilet. Handshakes, backslaps, and proclamations of undying man-love crossed the room. At the centre of it was the stag - still standing and beating his chest as one of the few to make it to the end without being sick. His hair dishevelled, he staggered around the room, a maniacal glazed look in his eye and slurring his speech. Like everyone else in the room, he was absolutely, utterly battered.

Without having had a drop of booze.

I'm told that when the bad news was given to him, the stag went very, very quiet. And took a few minutes to sober up. Of course the only observers in the room were extremely drunk themselves, but the stag himself happily admitted to feeling smashed and never once thought to question the alcohol. He remembers after about 40 shots thinking to himself "I'm not feeling too bad here" but as everyone else around him descended into chaos, he went with the flow and even now swears that he felt hugely intoxicated at the time.

For me this indicates an important aspect of group dynamics: not only to we behave how those around us do, but our own mental state is affected by the expectations of those around us. We do as others do but even our inner feelings are affected. Clearly the stag's motor functions were theoretically capable of standing up straight and speaking properly; but the behaviour of those around him, combined with what he was primed to believe, affected his body's functions significantly. Think of it in reverse - have you ever had a few drinks and been drunk on adrenaline, only to witness a nasty car accident or to come home and find yourself burgled, and manage to sober up extremely quickly?

(PS - I say this was "unique" but I wonder if it has been demonstrated somewhere before? I'd love to know)

Decision making (2): choosing a seat on the bus

I conducted an informal five-minute focus group on Friday afternoon with colleagues. The topic of discussion was: imagine you go to sit upstairs on the bus. Every double seat has one person sitting in it, so you have the choice of the whole top deck, but you'll have to sit next to someone. Who do you sit next to?

Instant reactions included "completely random", "somewhere near the front", "over the back wheel", "the hottest girl" and "not next to anybody fat or smelly". All fairly predictable stuff.

When pushed a little further, people started to realise the subtleties of the decision. Did they sit on the left or on the right? Next to men or women? What if there were several places that all looked as good as each other?

A couple of people stubbornly refused to believe their choice was random at first, but had to admit that they had to make a conscious choice to actually do the action of sitting down. The discussion was fascinating, with several key areas coming into play.

The most cited motivations for choice were "someone ordinary", alongside "convenience". Ordinary meant not fat or smelly, not taking up the whole seat with bags, and no loud music. Even the blokes who said "I go straight for the most attractive girl" managed to elaborate: when I asked "wouldn't it look a bit obvious going straight for the hottest girl when you've got the whole bus to choose from?" everyone agreed, amending their choice to "across the aisle", "the most obtainable girl" (!) or "in which case I'll go for the second most attractive". Feel privileged, ladies.

Then a thought occurred to me. With as deadpan a tone as I could muster, I asked if they tended to sit next to white or black people. Everyone initially insisted this didn't cross their minds, and I was careful not to push anyone to say anything indiscreet...but then one of the (white) girls admitted she probably sat next to white people more of the time, which led to one or two other people mumbling something similar.

When I asked why this was, she came up with a fascinating piece of insight: "I think I try to sit next to people who are similar to me." I was delighted and leapt on this; it tallied with the fact that she had already said she tended to sit next to women (and perhaps gave a little more insight into what people meant by ordinary). Another girl separately said that she would sit next to people "about my age or a bit older." This all tied in neatly with Thomas Schelling's theories about racial segregation: a very slight preference to be amongst people like ourselves can result in near-complete racial segregation which can sunder a whole city. I wonder what Rosa Parks would make of a theory that perhaps segregation on buses could be more naturally occurring than one might think?

According to Robert Cialdini, we subconsciously lean towards choices that remind us of ourselves (although I reserve the right to remain sceptical about nominative determinism, as explained by Wired this month). If this is true, what questions does this answer for people wanting to affect decisions? Is this why Dove's campaign for real beauty struck a chord because people saw themselves in the ads? Or is that going too far?

So there seemed to be rational motivations (I could suggest loads of others - from window/aisle to proximity to the emergency exit to wanting to pretend-drive the bus from the front seat) and less rational ones. But what else could be affecting our decisions? For example, let's amend the parameters slightly - this time a couple of people get on in front of you. Perhaps their choices affect yours (the Herd effect). If you are with friends, how would that affect your decision (and how would your presence affect theirs?) What about if you were on the phone and therefore slightly distracted? How does experience affect your decision - would someone who takes the bus every day make a different choice to someone who has never taken a bus in their life?

But here's a tester: would people choose the same seat again, given the same initial conditions? Asking people they thought "no" but then these were the same people who thought their choice was random in the first place. But do they have a point? Stochastic choice models would suggest that yes, there will be a "random" element involved to a certain extent. Thinking about this, my gut reaction was to think "well of course that makes sense, with 20 seats to choose from it's hardly likely that you'd choose the same one each time" - but surely the fact that the probability of choosing the same seat ten times running is a function of the number of possible outcomes suggests that there is, in fact, a chance that with only two choices you wouldn't go for the same one each time. In general, though, it seems that stochastic models for decision making are generally preferred among academics. Comparable to quantum mechanics, they imply that any input-output model for a decision can only give a probability that a certain decision will be taken, given a certain set of initial conditions.

You could extend this psychology of seats on buses. On an emptying bus, at what point does it become appropriate to move away from the person next to you into an empty seat? And at what point do you become irritated if your new-found companion insists on staying put, rather than moving into a free double seat? In addition, if you're sitting on your own, presumably you breathe a sigh of relief when people decide to choose someone else (according to what you've learned today, you need to look as little like that person as possible!) but do you get paranoid if you are the last person to be chosen? I certainly do! All this is very similar, of course, to the etiquette of choosing a urinal - every self-respecting bloke should know this, but if not, then have a go at this game...

We make odd choices and have odd motivations depending on our circumstances. For some reason I'm reminded of a time, years and years ago, when I was in the local organic/health food shop with my dad - you know, the sort of place with business cards advertising reiki and aura therapy. In the vegetable section there were two boxes next to each other: Carrots (Dirty) and Carrots (Washed). The Carrots (Dirty), which were covered in soil, were more expensive than Carrots (Washed)! Another example of creative pricing!

The bus discussion evolved somewhat with my girlfriend in the pub (the Black Lion on Kilburn High Road, which is a cracking place). A couple of days previously Rachel had picked up some beers in the supermarket. We did our best to deconstruct the process.

She started out by looking to see if they had any Peroni, because she knew I like Peroni (bless her). They didn't have any in multipacks, so she looked at what was on special offer. There were a few options. She only looked at bottles - not cans. Why? Not sure, she was in a rush, and tired. How did she choose the crate of bottles, then? Some were 6 for £5, others were 8 for £6 which she thought was a better bargain. Did she look at the volume of the bottles? No. Why not? She was in a rush, and tired [she was becoming increasingly irritable by this point in the discussion!] Did she consider standard "session" lagers (Carlsberg, Carling, Fosters), or just premium lagers (Heineken, Stella, San Miguel)? Just premium lagers. Even though her primary motivation appeared to be cost? No, just premium lagers. Would she still agree that price was her primary motivation? Rachel glanced at me, then meaningfully at her empty glass, then at the bar, and then at me again. I took the hint.

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I've written much briefer post on decision making here and there's another half-written one in the pipeline - watch this space.

In which I ask a lot of questions about pricing, and answer none of them

It was a tweet from Rags Srinivasan, via Leigh Caldwell, that got me wondering. "If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?"

Certainly not me; I operate at the grubbier end of the shoe market. Caldwell, however, commented, "When behavioural economics can answer this, we've won." Caldwell's blog Knowing and Making and Twitter feed are both essential reading; they're the sort of effort that make one wish they had studied economics at university (or even at school). I know next to nothing about either pricing or behavioural economics (Caldwell's specialities) but I have read snippets by Ward Edwards and others on the marginal utility of money and perceived price, and it set me on a daydream.

The starting point is that the actual price of a product, and the price that the consumer thinks it costs are different entities. The relationship between actual price of a good, and its perceived price by a consumer is not necessarily linear. It might also depend on the product, sector, economic circumstances or, of course, the individual consumer and his whims. If you ask people "which do you think is more expensive, good A or good B?" for a range of products, then you can roughly calibrate a "perceived price" scale - which, after all, is going to drive the purchase decision far more than the actual price of the product.

This got me wondering: if the perceived price depends on the individual consumer, for a given product, under given test conditions (economic circumstances, etc), if you were to plot a histogram of those perceived prices, what would the dispersion of the curve be? And how does perceived price change depending on the consumer's income, and indeed over time?

And how would those dispersion curves be affected from product to product? This would be particularly interesting when comparing two products in the same sector. The acid-test question would be, if two competing products happened to be the same price, which would be perceived as more expensive?

These aren't just "nice-to-know" theoretical questions. If your company's product is the same price as a competitor, but people think it's more expensive, then this will very likely have an effect on the purchase decision, all other factors being equal. Although whether it's a good thing to be perceived as more expensive is not necessarily clear cut, either; it might be offputting (consumers might opt for the commodity they think is cheaper) but on the other hand if "more expensive" equates to "more desirable" then it may be an advantage ( - although then, presumably, that brand's prices are set too low.

It is logical that the relationship between actual and perceived price would vary across product categories, frequency with which they are bought, price as a percentage of disposable income, and whether the product is an "essential" commodity or a luxury.

So perceived prices - and indeed perceptions in the rate of change of price - will surely be different between bus fares, beer, washing powder, a packet of crisps - or designer shoes. Perceived value for money may depend on external factors as well. The mix of online and offline word of mouth, advertising, and economic trends could all contribute.

It is one thing to ask "who notices?" but the other question, of course, is "at what point does it become a problem?" At what point does a consumer go elsewhere to a competitor, or change their habits? What are their motivations for buying the product in the first place, and where does value for money (perceived, of course) fit into the decision-making process?

This leads on to a further question: how often do people compare changing prices across categories? Aside from the odd nostalgic "I remember when a pint cost less than a loaf of bread", I suspect it's not very often - after all do we really compare the utility and value for money of a litre of petrol compared to a litre of Coke? How often do we consider the price of a month's travelcard, and evaluate it versus a month's electricity? Consciously, I'd argue, rarely - but subconsciously? And even if we do, how often do we make conscious decisions to spend money on one luxury over another, or to sacrifice a luxury for a commodity, or even vice versa? Surveys ask blandly "Do you think you have cut back your spending in the last 3 months?" but without probing the thought processes that go into belt-tightening or splurging, those sorts of questions strike me as next to meaningless. Knowing that people have less disposable income is one thing, working out behavioural patterns and irrational decisions, and how to make sure that as the manager of a gym your customers sacrifice a meal in a restaurant each month, or even shiver in darkness, rather than give up their membership - that's the sort of question we need to be asking. Are those purchasing decisions rational in a recession, and how can we find them out?

Putting people on the spot in surveys, asking "is product X good value for money?" always seems contrived, and I have instinctive doubts about the validity of answers when compared to an unprompted population. Worse still are questions along the lines of "how much would you be willing to pay for product X?" I have filled in surveys of this type before, and consistently give a figure lower than what I'd "really" be willing to pay, in a subtle effort to drive down the price of my favourite products, and I suspect this will be true of many people. I certainly can't imagine anyone saying "I think this product should cost more than it already does" - although perhaps someone can enlighten me to the contrary!

A lot of questions, then. One final one - where can I read more about the psychology of pricing, and hopefully find the answers to some of them?

Getting the balance right between search and social media

In the last few days an American study for Google has shown that search, rather than social media, is the biggest driver of word of mouth.



The timing of this announcement was interesting, as it coincided with the launch of the Google+ social network. Forget all the excitable "Is it a Facebook killer" chatter; it is a logical progression for a search engine to move towards more human-generated content - based on both your own preferences and those of your contacts.

I haven't played with Google+ yet (OK, OK, what I mean is I haven't had an invite...DAYS behind the times, darling) but my hope would be that rather than merely offering an alternative to established social networks, that it would integrate heavily with other Google products, and I imagine that Google themselves are thinking the same way. Much is being made of the "circles" concept, but I would think that there is more at stake with heavy integration with YouTube, Blogger and, yes, search. The "+1" concept, alongside the recent trend for including acquaintances' tweeted link in search results  already means that Google are actively "socialising" their search offering. In an excellent blog post, Simon Mainwaring says that "search...is becoming increasingly inward facing, with the individual as filter."

As a colleague of mine pointed out, this may limit our own personal web somewhat, if we are restricting ourselves to search results based on the preferences of others. He has a point; the fact that we are naturally social  creatures, I hope, won't be an excuse to diminish the breadth of our web universe. However, this provides an immediate reference point - if time is short, then a link that your friend has recommended is likely to be your first port of call over anything else. I hope this can be extended into Google+ to make it a content-driven social network; Facebook has no handy way of storing your favourite content in one place ("Likes" are a mess), while social bookmarking sites are sprawling and geek-heavy. If Google get this right, Google+ could be a Digg killer.

But it seems that search itself is a social phenomenon, which leads us back to the Keller Fay study. They don't go into methodological details but claim that "conversations referencing search are thought by consumers to be more credible and more likely to purchase, compared to those that reference social media." They emphasise that offline word of mouth dominates online; but that both TV and internet content drive those conversations (online and offline). And of the internet content that drives conversations, it's the stuff found in search engines that is the most influential.

This goes slightly against the fashionable line of thinking that all conversations just happen organically, that we're purely influenced by those around us, and that there are no tangible drivers; I think it also makes sense. We ARE all capable of thinking for ourselves, of looking for things we like, then finding them (and I'd say this study vindicates Google's search algorithm somewhat if we're liking the things we find via search!) and sharing our favourite content. After all, isn't it natural to TRY and influence people?

This research is a clear warning that "buzz" agencies need to do more than just creating some snappy content, shoving it on Twitter and Facebook and waiting for the rest to happen organically. Ultimately, if brands are measuring their word-of-mouth success purely by numbers of retweets and Facebook Likes then they will fail; the interactions between our online conversations, offline conversations and, critically, the actions we take as a result, that are most important. It transpires that the internet and TV have equal importance in influencing consumer conversations, but that the internet is used as an information checking tool (as one might expect) and that search, in particular, has more bite: "conversations referencing search are thought by consumers to be more credible (+25%) and more likely to lead to purchase (+ 17%), compared to those that reference social media."

By subtly integrating their various products yet keeping them disparate, boosting their core search product, and offering a simplified interface to social networking, Google are taking the fight back to Facebook - and it seems they have a new lease of life.

Update: this article in the International Business Times is worth a read.

Decision making (1)

For several weeks I've been making painfully slow progress through Francesco Nicosia's classic work from the 60s, Consumer Decision Processes. It's an academic work in a field where I have no formal training, so I'll forgive myself the slowness, although to be fair my eyes occasionally glaze over when reading it on the Overground after a long day at work.

I've still got a long way to go on it (estimated finish time: 2013) but although it's not always edge of the seat stuff (by page 80 the reader has just been informed that a decision starts with a goal and ends with an act) it is a carefully constructed breakdown of how decisions might work. Nicosia reviews the existing literature but it was the ideas of Paul Lazarsfeld that grabbed me.

Lazarsfeld's scheme, from 1935, basically postulates that at time T you have an individual with feelings or situations I(T) in his environment E(T). The environment acts on those feelings and situations, and helps shape them in turn. Of course, only relevant environmental concerns will have any effect on the individual.

For example, E could be anything from some word of mouth, to a change in personal circumstances, to an ad, to a change in product availability, to an event, to a product attribute. So E feeds into I, which in turn is changed, so another "set" of environmental variables will come into play, and so on in a constant iterative process, until the individual preferences reach a critical point leading to some tangible action, and the decision is made. It sounds lovely and simple, but the key point is that all these variables play off one another; so one particular variable will only have an effect on, or be relevant to, another variable depending on what stage of the process you are at.

I feel the marketing implications of this scheme are clear. Imagine first the universe of individual variables (circumstances, opinions and so forth), alongside the universe of environmental variables. The trick is to draw up some sort of infinite Venn diagram, and work out which variables interact with which other variables, and under what circumstances. The marketeer can then consider which of those variables he has control of, and apply them at the appropriate point in the decision process. But the hard bit is realising that each individual circumstance will be different; so are there patterns, or general rules, that can be drawn - and indeed are the decisions that are being taken to purchase the product in question the same or different?

Of course the environmental variables such as product attributes themselves are not constants; because it's the subjective opinion on product benefits that matters. Which neatly ties in with what Ward Edwards and others were looking at in the 50s (my progress through Nicosia is supersonic compared to the rate I'm reading Amos Tversky-edited Decision Making!) I won't pretend to know anything at all about microeconomic theory, but the key to "utility curves", marginal utility and a value-to-cost ratio is that the value or utility of a product is subjective. Even something like price is subjective; the perceived cost is more important than the actual cost when it comes to decision making.

Weak ties and social media: Malcolm Gladwell is partly right

Philosophical discussions surrounding the reach and power of social media are all too often tedious and predictable, but the news that Malcolm Gladwell has written a piece in the New York Times which fiercely doubts the extent to which social media can effect large-scale social change, got me interested.

Basically Gladwell's point is that mass behaviour such as the civil rights movements in the 1960s, took place perfectly naturally without the need for social media. Furthermore, he points out, social media encourages a culture of "me too" in so far as clicking "Like" or "RT" is concerned, but our activism tends to be confined to words rather than deeds these days. In short, social media encourages lazy activism.

Social media evangelists, some of whom often cite Gladwell as their hero (hi Xavi), are up in arms, and apparently feel a bit betrayed. There have been numerous discussions on all sorts of blogs in the last few days since the article as published -  including an interesting riposte here. I'm in two minds, but tend to agree broadly with much of what Gladwell says where social change is concerned.

An example is Justgiving. A few years ago, if someone was climbing Kilimanjaro or running the marathon for charity, they'd call up their friends and relatives, go into their local newsagent, do a whip-around at work. These days, it's merely a quick page on Justgiving and that's it. Most requests for donations completely pass me by because they're two-a-penny, impersonal requests; if someone called me up and asked me to sponsor them, I'd do it! Then there are the "awareness" campaigns. While I'd agree with Leo Mirani that awareness campaigns are vitally important in many cases, and that social media has indeed revolutionised the way that causes and issues can explosively reach a mass audience, at the same time there are plenty of examples of limp, "passive activism" through social media.

An example was World Aids Day earlier this year, when any tweet with the hashtag #red changed colour. It took off in a big way - huge numbers used the hashtag. But there was rarely any context; I didn't actually realise the significance of the hashtag until the day was nearly finished, having seen dozens of tweets referring to it. Having fun with colour-changing tweets is all very well, and I'm sure the HIV-positive millions in south Africa would be touched, but commitment levels were clearly minimal.

Another social media example, this time on Facebook, was the viral spreading of Facebook status updates by women, who posted a colour (it turned out to be their bra colour) - apparently men weren't supposed to know what it meant. To that extent it worked: my at-the-time-all-male office were puzzled for days. (It transpired that it was something to do with breast cancer).

Just this week, a new breast cancer "update your Facebook status" campaign has appeared. If any of your female friends have posted something saucy ("I like it up on the kitchen table) in the last 48 hours, that'll be it. Harmless fun, but what good does it to cancer sufferers? I nearly fell into a fatal trap: I posted a cynical update to my own Facebook status, and was shutting down the machine...when the realisation of my own hypocrisy hit me.

Then I picked the correct option.

The examples posed by Gladwell were concerned with activism, but to what extent does social media, more generally, have the power to change behaviour? Can social media affect our decision making processes, which in turn might affect commercial or other enterprises? The debate, I think, is far more wide-reaching than merely political campaigns. To what extent can the connections people forge via social media channels change their behaviour, compared to connections made by more "traditional" means? What are the political, social and commercial implications?

The crucial sentence in Gladwell's article simply states that "The platforms of social media are built on weak ties". Yes - but aren't those the ties with the most potential? Close family-and-friends bonds are immensely powerful, restrict yourself to your usual social circle and it's all too easy to find yourself associating with people from similar cultural and economic backgrounds, with similar outlooks on life. By throwing caution to the wind (the relative anonymity of social media can help throw off the shackles - a bit like alcohol for losing inhibitions!) and getting involved with a range of conversations, minds have the potential to be changed. I'll never have a bad word said against my closest friends, I love them all, mates for life and all the rest of it, but our conversations tend to be limited to rugby, women, poker, alcohol, and how much the rest of them are earning. My loose connections in social media allow me to have active discussions on all kinds of offbeat topics.

The internet has facilitated this since its early days. Whether it's an interest in obscure music or bizarre sexual practices, the internet has allowed people to come together and spread ideas; the fact that Facebook and Twitter have come along and made the process a bit more personal and one-to-one haven't "revolutionised" this, rather they are an organic extension of internet culture as it was in the early 2000s. And what of the ultimate in extreme views, the cult? It's far easier to join a cult now than it was in the 60s, and many people are doing more than just spreading words and ideas, but going ahead with actual deeds.

Just a little aside about weak social bonds. They can be misleading. I was at my ten-year school reunion over the weekend; catching up with people who have little in common except that we spent six years in the same building. The general impression beforehand was that the evening would be a cringeworthy affair where we put on plastic smiles, exchanged the usual pleasantries, tossed up a few memories, and left. That couldn't be further from the truth. Many of us came away open-mouthed about how much those long-distant memories meant to us all. Old school friends are classic examples of those sorts of casual Facebook relationships - but a reunion demonstrates just how those apparently flaky, throwaway "friendships" can be astonishingly powerful.

One of the great things about social media is that it's possible to converse on an equal footing with world experts in a particular area. People at the top of their game within a profession or interest area mingle with dabblers on a hashtag or discussion forum. It's something which Andrew Keen rallies against in his book Cult of the amateur (I haven't read it); apparently the thrust of his argument is that there's an obsession with sharing knowledge, even from people who are clueless, so we see a false sense of gravitas created by an individual based on participation levels, social skills, or other interactive means. This week Andrew Marr launched a tirade against bloggers for similar reasons. It's true that it's possible to exude a false sense of gravitas on forums and social networks based on participation levels or social skills. It's also true that many heads are not always better than one. But at the same time, crowdsourcing and wikis provide collaborative efforts unheard of before. (One of the most interesting articles on Wikipedia is actually about the reliability of Wikipedia). There's no longer a top-down approach to knowledge - a point also made by Ben Goldacre in his excellent Bad Science. Yet he "top" of "top-down" might not be experts but rather a media, government and commercial elite who form opinions almost by brute force. As Goldacre points out, when the small media elite get things wrong, there can be disastrous consequences, as with the MMR "scandal".

Lively discussions now occur in frameworks as diverse as Amazon reviews, Wikipedia talk pages, and comments sections on mainstream media publisher articles, notable on the Guardian and Daily Mail websites (not to mention Guido Fawkes's blog comments, although tread there with caution). Of all social media, I find forums the most fascinating. Unlike most social networks, forum users tend not to know each other when they join up initially, but bonds and cliques naturally form over time, while all sorts of interesting social undercurrents start to manifest themselves. Inspired by Tom Ewing's excellent Confessions of a Moderator, at some point I will write a little piece comparing forum dynamics of the ones I've known. For a rainy day, though.

In my own personal experience, social networking has allowed me to participate in discussions (often arguments) with people I've never met, sometimes halfway around the world. The flow of inbound information and content is far more varied (and just more abundant); no longer are we restricted to what we read in the Metro in the morning, and watch on the ten o'clock news. With minimal effort we can subject ourselves to some rather extreme views from all sides, evaluate them, spread our own ideas around.

Postscript: the bank called me the following morning, alarmed at an unusual payment on my card the previous night to Cancer Research that "didn't fit in with my normal spending habits". That's me told!

***Update*** I've just become aware of this piece in Wired which references a paper from 1973 about weak ties. I haven't actually read the Granovetter paper yet, but I'm hoping it'll be an academic viewpoint similar to my own amateurish daydreams!

Which is about racial distribution, Monet and "neuromarketing"

I'm quite particular in who I follow on Twitter, and who I place on lists. I regularly cull anyone who tweets too much, or tweets rubbish, or is overly self-promotional, or just links to stuff that I don't find personally interesting. On the flipside, it means I get to read a lot of really interesting content. This week I've come across some more really interesting articles.

At the moment, my entire reading list (books not blogs!) seems to be based on Mark Earls's bibliography. I'm still ploughing my way through the latter chapters of Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehaviour. It's quite pedestrian in style, but methodical and quietly brilliant. Basically it's a calm, rational, statistically-orientated study on the way small personal preferences - just a few per cent here and there - can result in major changes in group outcomes. There are numerous studies, all carefully argued step-by step without any QED flourishes (but then who needs flourishes when you've got a Nobel Prize to your name). The most famous chapter is the one where a simple home-made experiment (you can do it too: all you need is a few coins and a chessboard) demonstrates how very small preferences to have some of your own kin around you, end up in quite stark racial segregation across cities.

It's all very well seeing pictures in a book of what look like noughts and crosses, and as a reader you nod your head and say "how shocking"...but, living in "multicultural" London, where it feels like people of all different colours are jumbled up together, complete racial segregation feels a long way away. I suspect it can't be all that different in the States, either; which is why these new graphics of racial distribution by location are all the more startling.

I'm just beginning to dabble a little in reading around some psychology and neuroscience pieces at the moment, and having been just a few weeks ago to a superb Impressionist exhibition, I found this New Scientist article offering a possible explanation to why the Impressionists are so popular: basically the lack of detail means that our own imaginations are stirred into "filling in the gaps", while our subconscious locks onto blurred images with greater intensity than we might do otherwise. Fascinating stuff.

The same magazine has been causing a bit of a stir recently with its highly publicised experiment to pick the best front cover based on a neuroscience experiment. The neuromarketing claims have caused a bit of a stir with both scientists and neuroscience-focussed market researchers; even Derren Brown picks up on it, and links to this interesting article. Meanwhile, Robert Bain on Research Live presents the story against the background of other neuroscience/marketing issues, and gives a thoughtful and balanced analysis of some of the techniques availale right now. Peter McGraw, on the other hand, is much more sceptical.

Tapping into our natural instincts is nothing new. In Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy explains that the average person looks at an ad for 0.9 seconds, their eyes sweeping from top left to bottom right. (Eye tracking seems more interested in web design applications these days - plenty of interesting stuff out there to read on the web like this article). While advertising agencies and branding consultancies are obsessed with wanting to portray themselves as "different" (there are some truly gruesome straplines but perhaps the most vomitworthy is BBH's "when the world zigs, zag"), surely the aim of most marketers should be to discover scientifically what their best practices should be, and find out evidentially how people respond to certain situations, and act accordingly.

One or two people are muttering darkly about the ethical considerations of neuromarketing. It's a fair point. There's something slightly subversive about much of this, a little like subliminal advertising (a concept which I don't have a great deal against personally). My own take is that neuroscience probably has a lot to offer when it comes to trying to unravel subconscious decisions made by consumers, particularly at point of sale. There's probably a lot of very interesting research that can be done into packaging and logos, for example, based on brain activity, which might explain a shopper's instinctive decision to choose one washing powder over another, particularly on occasions where their usual brand is out of stock and they are relying purely on instinct. As for New Scientist? As Peter McGraw points out, it's a shame that the tree covers couldn't have all been put on sale, to add some real-world data to the lab experimental data. There are loads of great articles out there at the moment, fascinating stuff.

As a postscript, I'm slightly regretting climbing down on my last blog post. I honestly think that anyone who's happy to spout the unverified "research" claims of vitamin supplements on the whim of a PR company but not realise that they're apparently endorsing the product - especially where children are the topic of conversation - deserves both barrels. However, it reads better as it is now, and there's no point in dragging something out.

Becoming a Bad Science disciple, and mummy blogger bullshit

Yesterday Ben Goldacre's Bad Science plopped on the mat, and over the next little while it will be competing with all the other unfinished books that I'm trying to juggle. Bad Science has the unfair advantage, however, of being something that once you've started, is rather hard to stop.

I'm only a few pages in so won't make much comment at this stage except that Goldacre articulates many things that you suspected already but weren't that sure about - covering all those nebulous things like cosmetics, dietary supplements and so on, which you had an idea were based on guff but never actually went out of your way to read up on. As discussed by Mark Earls in Herd when he cites Bad Science, as interesting as the bullshit is the natural way that it can spread in conversations, in such a way that it's almost like an epidemic.

One thing that strikes me is that for anyone who's not an expert on any given subject...and most of us aren't experts on anything...it's easy to believe anything from someone who is perceived as an authority. It's a perfectly natural reaction. The problem is that the "authority" may just be a journalist, celebrity, or general big shot in a completely unrelated field.


The internet is a wonderful tool for keeping an undercurrent of dissent going, and there is a disproportionate amount of anti-bullshit, anti-conspiracy, anti-spin material out there, with some voices who are capable of shouting pretty loud. Ben Goldacre is just one example. That "moral majority" can propagate their messages far and wide via social media these days - so in many cases, if there's a seriously dodgy bit of misinforamtion being spread by a company, political party of whatever, then often the "truth" will come out.
The problem is, as with the MMR case, that all that can backfire if the well-meaning moral majority all have it wrong, and the "establishment" figures were right to begin with. There's a fine line between mythbusting and unjustified panic.

There's a lot to be said about the "detox" myth, though. I'm a sucker for it myself: I firmly believe in the power of orange juice to cure pretty much all manner of ills from hangovers to flu. I've got a pretty nasty cold at the moment and made sure I got some orange juice at lunchtime. Beyond being vaguely aware that vitamin C is "a good thing" and helps the immune system, I'm not an expert on its powers. But I've always felt a nice tingly sensation after drinking orange juice on top of a cold, and manage to convince myself that it's doing me good, and it's a habit I'm unlikely to change.

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From this point forward, I've decided to amend the post. I made a critical reference to one particular blog post by someone who I've never met and have nothing to do with. I exchanged some constructive email correspondence today with an anonymous person who criticised my approach and said that the blogger in question was personally upset. I make no apology for the post and won't remove it - my points still stand - but I'll tone things down a bit and make more general references, rather than a personal criticism. I think that's a reasonable compromise.

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I haven't reached the relevant chapter yet, but vitamin supplements companies come in for stinging criticism in Bad Science. Now, I don't know much about vitamins or dietary science or nutrition or anything like that, but I do know that these companies exploit people's ignorance and fears. Look at the advertising. Everything is "this important period in your life" - whether it's childhood, teenage years, pregnancy, menopause, old age. They prey on vulnerable people not knowing what's right for them, people who worry that their diet might not be as varied as it could be and what effects this might have on their health. Scavenging like vultures are the supplements companies, making you paranoid that you're not getting enough selenium.

It's against this backdrop that we come to the phenomenon of the "mummy blogger". They need little introduction - there are countless articles on them already. Although not a parent myself, I have spent a fair bit of time on "mummy blogs" over the last few months, and my private opinion is that almost without exception, they are devoid of interesting content. Many of them are written by PR professionals, and they mainly consist of backslapping each other for getting on various "top bloggers" lists, the odd photostream of their little ones, and an incessant stream of saccharine "reviews" of products sent to them by PR companies. Thought-provoking content is a rarity; they are some way ahead of the SEO-boosting affiliates/link farms/pseudo-blogs, but not a million miles away. It's a field which has had vast amounts of media coverage to the extent that it might be called a "phenomenon", although they are all quite SEO savvy, with badges, charts and backlinks to each other's blogs all over the place - the vast majority of comments seem to come from "fellow mummy bloggers" rather than organically.

I appreciate that this is the way PR works, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest that bloggers are sent free products and samples in order to review them. On the contrary, if the bloggers are given inspiration for things to write about, as well as free products, and the brands get coverage, and the readers get things to read about on a regular basis, then everyone's a winner. Paid reviews are common in many fields - whether restaurant review blogs (lucky them!) or travel bloggers (even luckier them!) - and as long as the bloggers get a reputation for fair reporting, with constructive criticism where necessary, and make it clear if a post is sponsored or if the reviewed products were free, then they can be a valuable source of information.

There have been several parenting blogs writing pieces in the last few days about Seven Seas' range of supplements for children, "Haliborange". I'll freely admit to being deeply cynical of supplements companies targeting nervous and paranoid parents, who worry about the state of their children's health and diet; I'm even more cynical of them convincing parents to write positive things about their products. But I feel that the bloggers themselves have a responsibility too, towards their readers, and I think that some of them have let themselves down.

Several bloggers have remarked, uncritically, that omega 3 - and thus Haliborange - increase concentration/attentiveness in children. One, who makes no reference to her piece being a sponsored post - states confidently that "numerous studies" have shown this. Another mentions that she is looking to feed her daughter vitamins, while propagating the official Haliborange line that the product "may" improve children's concentration; in the comments, she suggests that she's rather sceptical of their claims, but makes no mention of this in the initial post. None of them have tried using the product on their kids; therefore none of them are actually reviewing the product, but rather just endorsing it, with a greater or lesser amount of personal response to the concept of vitamin pills for kids.

What benefits omega 3 actually has, I don't know - although I bet you anything mummy Newton and mummy Freud and mummy Shakespeare weren't obsessively shoving tinned fish down their respective sons' throats. (I also note that Ben Goldacre has devoted an entire chapter to the subject, so I'm sure there are some untold stories. That said, I'm sure it can't do any harm, there's mountains of anecdotal evidence out there so it probably does something good, and it's up to any parent to decide if their kids are eating a healthy diet and if there's a need to do somethnig about it if not. What gets my goat is that the brand - or rather, their PR/digital/social media people - have managed to persuade bloggers to reproduce their PR material pretty much verbatim.


When someone comes blind to a subject and looks for advice, they might read some newspaper articles, they might get on Google, they might read a book. But most of all they'll go to people they'll trust - friends and family first and foremost, and then, perhaps, bloggers. My feeling is that since blogs began, they've been looked at with more trust than newspaper/magazine journalists, because there's a sense that they're drawing from personal experience, telling their own stories. If they're parroting PR companies' spin on issues which could involve worried parents, paranoid about how best to care for their kids, then I think they're letting the side down pretty badly. Surely they have a responsibility to their readers?


Seven Seas/Haliborange have previous history here, inducing the wrath of the Mumsnet community after some grubby sockpuppeting on the forum a few months ago. The mums responded in kind, with a nice SEO-sabotaging campaign. A nice bit of work, and something perhaps the bloggers currently doing their bit for Seven Seas were unaware of. Although I note that Seven Seas have been working with a new PR agency - Virgo Health - since that debacle, who presumably weren't implicated in it.

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I should also stress that these are my own private opinions.
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PS I wonder if Ben Goldacre ever saw the Real Hustle scam where the conmen sold tiny pots of boutique moisturising cream for £25 a pop. They marketed the fact that Petroselinum crispum was the active ingredient. The "natural powers" held within would cleanse and rejuvenate the skin, or something.

Petroselinum is the Latin for parsley. They had blitzed some parsley with some cheap lotion from Asda (£3 for a large bottle), put it into minuscule jars, stuck on a fancy label, and sold them for a profit margin of around 3000%, if I recall. It was brilliant.

Mark Earls - "Herd": the Da Vinci Code of marketing?

Mark Earls is clearly in the wrong profession. He's an ad man by trade, but Herd: How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature lurches between a vast array of subjects covering all types of popular science yet is so tangential that it rarely mentions any direct applications to marketing and market research. Instead, Earls has created a tome to make you go and think for yourself, and explore topics in greater depth.

It's a beautifully printed volume - nice paper, nice typeface and a bright pink cover of the sort that makes people on the tube squint to see what you're reading (and when they see the "how to change mass behaviour" title combined with a suitably megalomaniac look in your eyes, you'll get a bit of extra standing room, I promise you). The writing style is very much in the catchy mould of the advertising professional, albeit the author is a planner by trade, not a creative. Short, sharp sentences. With lots of sentences starting with 'with'. And many more starting with 'and'.

I'm going to start at the end, rather than the beginning: the bibliography is one of the highlights of the whole book, and the sceptic might suspect that Earls may have gone to great lengths to deliberately cram in as many offbeat and varied references as possible. From Freud to Popbitch, from Goebbels to Thatcher, at times it feels like Earls is desperate to show his versatility and open-mindedness. It should also be pointed out that Earls pays humble tributes to many writers before him, and is quick to pay credit. Indeed his praise for several books put them straight on my wishlist. One of them is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which, by sheer coincidence, I found my dad (who is neither a marketeer nor a scientific revolutionary, but a psychoanalyst) is currently reading. As an aside, I asked him about repressed memory and the controversies surrounding it; his explanation was almost word-for-word identical to the description in Herd - which certainly added a lot of credibility to the book in my eyes.

Another I did pick up: Micromotives to Macrobehaviour, Nobel Laureate Thomas C Schelling's study of the way group behaviour is affected by tiny fluctuations in individual perceptions or opinions, and the way the decisions of individuals relate to overall crowd behaviour. The examples at times seem so obvious, yet seeing them written down makes you think twice about crowd behaviour. It's absolutely compelling - one of the best I've read in ages. Herd builds on the solid foundations placed by Schelling and sexes it up; he also begins to muse on how these crowd-behaviour phenomena might affect marketing campaigns, although, perhaps wisely, leaves many questions unanswered: what would be the fun in creating loads of mysteries only to clear them all up?

Schelling touches on traffic modelling - something of which I know little, other than it's a fascinating subject and well worth exploring. One fundamental principle is that traffic jams flow backwards with a wave-like motion, as first set out by Lighthill & Whitham in their 1955 paper On kinematic waves II - a theory of traffic flow on long crowded roads (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Vol 229 pp 312-345) - something which I'm intending to dig out of the British Library at some point, although to get started I have a copy of Robert Banks' Towing icebergs, falling dominoes and other adventures in applied mathematics (I'll report back if I ever become an amateur traffic expert). Hat tip to a Durham maths student called SG Hockey for the links - his dissertation is well worth a read, although it comes with a health warning - if, like me, mere mention of partial differential equations is enough to trigger a heart flutter, then it might be best avoided. He also links to this experiment by Yuki Sugiyama et al which is an experimental verification of, in their words, "a dynamical phenomenon of a many-particle system" of which "in general, such a system drastically changes its macroscopic aspect owing to the collective motion of many interacting particles". A direct analogy of the sort of behaviour Schelling and Earls are talking about! Keep those two chevrons' distance on the motorway, and you'll do your bit to keep traffic flowing as sudden braking slows everything down. It's easier to see on a crowded escalator: if you're in the "fast lane" (left hand side if you're from London!) bunched up close, if the person in front of you stops suddenly, you'll make a sudden stop, as will the people behind you...in seconds, the whole escalator will come to a standstill. Next time you're heading down to the Northern line at Euston in rush hour, try looking behind you to watch the jam flow backwards. It works. Keep a sedate distance, and you might just help speed people's journeys up.

So much for a book review, I hear you say. This deviated from the mainline ages ago. OK, I may be going off at a tangent, but that's probably Herd's greatest strength: for all I might be sceptical of some of its conclusions, and for all I might scoff at the writing style at times, it doesn't half inspire you to think outside the box. I found myself drifting off into daydreams of herd-like behaviour as I was reading. Earls' enthusiasm is infectious. Let's put the traffic modelling to one side for now, however - if anyone knows an expert who can explain it to me properly, please let me know.

[Update, 7 September: I'm now reading Banks' Towing Icebergs which is very interesting if you like maths, and is bringing back rather more vivid memories of differential equations than I'd like to remember; and how could I forget to link to this post comparing traffic modelling to online communities?]

Meanwhile, Mark Earls is able to cover huge amounts of ground in subjects close to his heart. He launches into a discourse on one of hs favourite subjects with gusto in the early pages. a self-confessed amateur primatologist, he explores the human/chimp boundary and concludes that socially, as well as physiologically, we are infinitesimally close: humans are an example of a super-social ape. Chapter 1 doesn't say anything particularly radical. Rather, it sets the scene for Earls' later dramas, a scene with all humans as a naturally social species, with interactions with other people playing a central role in the way we approach all problems and decisions.

The second chapter carries on where the first left off, with helter-skelter, high octane voyages of discovery covering illusions and memory - and where the two meet in the middle. Then, out of the blue on page 72, comes the first killer blow: the claim that attitudes change after behaviour, not before.

This is based on work by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose writing sounds fascinating and whose book Judgement and uncertainty: heuristics and biases has shot straight to the upper echelons of my wishlist.

I take issue slightly with the way Earls treated Kahneman's work, although I must stress that I haven't read the original material. Earls seems to sensationalise everything - using Kahneman's "lazy minds" theory to suggest that nobody ever makes decisions for themselves and we're kidding ourselves if we think we do. It's easy enough to understand the point he's making - and it's an important one - but does he need to exaggerate so much? It's a rather tabloid style that turned me off the book somewhat; indeed, my enjoyment of of the book fluctuated as I went through - looking something like this:

How good is Herd? It varies as you go through. (Pictorial representation only!)

Kahneman's model talks of heuristics as mentioned by Nigel Hollis - subconscious, instinctive, even irrational judgements or actions that we make. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the impression I get is that Earls takes a rather defeatist attitude: he seems to suggest that it's not possible to break down and analyse the motivations for these heuristics, let alone take advantage of the heuristics themselves and influence people's decisions in this way. Surely that is one of the great challenges for researchers and marketers: to discover the heuristics at the point of decision-making and then throw a spanner in the works by affecting those unconscious thoughts. Earls, it seems to me, seems to take a rather fatalistic attitude (repeated later in the book) - you can't do anything about it so don't bother trying.


The attitudes change... statement might be controversial, but, as Earls points out, it challenges the awareness-interest-desire-action model of marketing. Decisions might not be made in the frames of reference we assume.

The question is: how can we work out in what ways, and at what times, that decisions are made? The most obvious example of mass behaviour not working out as expected that I can think of in recent months was Cleggmania in the run-up to the general election in May this year. Before the election, I attended a social media summit where respected political commentator (and influential blogger) Paul Waugh proffered the opinion that the result of the election would depend less on social media than on television, as the televised leaders' debates would change more attitudes than anything else.

The first debate took place and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was almost universally acknowledged by those who watched the show live to have "won" it. Sure enough, the various opinion polls, with their varied fieldwork dates (some with rolling fieldwork dates; there was much excitement on the UK Polling Report discussing methodologies!) displayed dramatic increases in support levels for the Lib Dems.

But let's consider. Say 10 million people watched the debate on TV and another 5 million saw clips on YouTube or on the news, a total of 15 million who had seen the debate in some form, and not all of those would be eligible to vote. How many genuine floating voters among that lot? Surely not that many. Yet the changes in the opinion polls were dramatic. The Liberals gained up to 10% of the vote in the space of a couple of days in some polls. What was even more interesting was the fact that the bounce wasn't just an immediate thing: the Lib Dem share of support increased as time went on - and stayed high throughout the remaining weeks.

Surely this was a classic example of herd behaviour going on? Had the Twitter campaigns (for example #iagreewithnick) succeeded? Critically, were there people changing their preference who had not actually seen the debate at all, but were reacting to the hype and opinions of others around them? It's often said that voters like to choose a winner so that they can feel like they have contributed something personally to that success; this is why such positive language is used in electioneering. The Lib Dems, masters of the campaign trail thanks to the genius of Chris Rennard, have monopolised the phrase "Winning Here" as a result.

And yet come election day, the herd phenomenon seemed to vanish completely. Pre-debate polls were actually more acurate than post-debate. This seems to have been a dramatic example of the herd effect/word of mouth affecting opinions, yet when it came to the decision-making that really counted, the voters lost their nerve, or else there are other heuristics involved inside the ballot box. My feeling is that Earls' Herd theory needs re-evaluating after this, but also the research industry as a whole: the post-debate polls were largely worthless in predicting the election result, given that they gave a Lib Dem share of up to 30% right up until polling day, which dissolved completely. That's not to say there was necessarily any flaws with the methodologies used at the time... just that people's intentions can be different from their actions (as Earls would agree - it's a fundamental point of his book).

What can researchers learn from this? That intentions and behaviour are very different - that surveys can be a very inaccurate way of predicting future behaviour (what's the disclaimer that you get on investment ads?) - that perhaps word of mouth has its limits. Were the polls useless? Not entirely; they may be able to give a clue to the heuristics involved in making a decision on who to vote for. Besides things like fear, optimism, wanting to contribute to a success story...what could they be? I have no idea, but anyone who works them out accurately could be a person in great demand. I'd love to know what Mark Earls' thoughts are on the mechanisms at work in the weeks preceding the election.

Earls' argument, taken more generally, is that people are not really in control of their own lives and opinions. The key point for research is that what we think we believe in, or what we aspire to believe, or what we believe we do, and the actions we actually take, may not tally up at all. Now researchers have known for ages about the dangers of respondents giving "socially acceptable" answers to questionnaires. earls takes things further by arguing that traditional focus groups can never provide a natural environment in which we operate and interact, and that we need more organic ways of monitoring behaviour - ideally at the point at which those heuristics kick in. Does this simply point to social media research? I'm not so sure. Monitoring naturally occurring conversations - in forums and on Facebook, for example - can give a wealth of opinion data; but as with a focus group, one is reliant on opinions being put forward, however naturally that may be. Perhaps some of the newer, more sophisticated techniques might be the way forward in analysing decision-making processes - are they just hot air though?

Rich use of case studies is one of the best things about Herd. The Milgram Experiment is one terrifying example of just how irrational human behaviour can become when we feel that there is an "accepted" way of thinking. I'd never heard of it before and barely dared to breathe as I read Earls' two page account. I distinctly remember staring at the wall and saying "shit" repeatedly after reading about it. There are other, similarly dramatic (if less horrifying) examples which most "marketing" books won't come within a hundred miles of. For example, how much idle fun can you have with this Mexican Wave generator? (There are other similar modelling simulations here).

Having set the scene, Mark Earls proceeds to lay down his Seven Principles of Herd Marketing. Don't get too excited: this isn't a step-by-step bible on how to double your turnover in a year. Rather, they're a set of rather nebulous ideas, some of which are frustratingly obvious. Instead, you should continue to focus your attention on the game-changing case studies and analogies with which his arguments are made.

It starts unpromisingly. Urinals? C'mon Mark, it doesn't need a laborious analysis of the rules - that's known to anyone who's ever had a few drunken conversations (if you haven't, there's plenty of stuff on the internet). My attention wavered. Following this, however, we get into the real meat of the first chapter (simply entitled Interaction): it's lengthy, but rich in case data and ideas, and convincingly presented. We learn about markets; whether it's betting markets or financial markets, much of their behaviour and volatility is a result not of external factors, but purely the interactions between people concerned. Betting markets are similar - particularly when you start to think about either starting-price betting, or the new betting exchanges such as Betfair, where you take on the market directly. There are comparisons to be made with game theory - another subject which Earls touches on, and Thomas Schelling concedes that his entire book is really about game theory. I was chatting to a hedge fund trading mate of mine the other week, who is keen to learn more about game theory in order to improve his work; if I remember to dig it out of a locker in Holborn, I'll lend it to him - I might point him in the direction of Herd at the same time.

A fascinating discussion on metastability ensues, and how phase transitions can be compared to other social situations (for example crime levels). The pedigree of the theories is impressive: Earls rehashing Phillip Ball rehashing Campbell & Ormerod influenced by Schelling. It's no less entertaining for all that. Thrillingly, there appear to be quite a few comparisons to be made between physical systems and human ones.

I wonder if Earls has ever come across percolation theory, an area of statistical mechanics which has some striking similarities to some of Earls' material. It deals with lattices connected by nodes and the probability of some form of path finding its way through the lattice to an infinite degree. In other words, if each individual bit of mesh in the coffee percolator has a certain probability that coffee will manage to drip through that one bit of mesh, what is the probability that some coffee will make it all the way through? Admittedly that's an oversimplification, but percolation theory, which has applications in geology and materials, as well as, for example, the propagation of forest fires. Networks vary, depending on the number of connections at each node, and the number of dimensions. But the key property is that, for an infinitely large lattice - the simplest model - across a range if individual node probabilities (how porous one "junction" is) the probability of the percolation taking place jumps from zero to one around a critical probability. So there's a critical point above which the information will always find a way through. The similarities with human networks are clear: each node or person or organisation, connected to a certain number of other nodes, has a certain chance of "getting their message across" to the next person. The spread of information greatly increases as the influence or effectiveness of transmission of information at a particular junction reaches a critical level. I wonder if the Mexican Wave model could be predicted using percolation theory? It's a fascinating subject - one I came across at university - and one that merits further reading.

Earls only makes direct reference to market research a few times in the text, but when he does, he tends to be pithy. He cites the example of when a different methodology gave a completely different answer to a descriptive research problem he was involved with on shoe-buying habits. It's easy to see where his scepticism towards traditional research methods comes from: a methodology could conform to all the usual rules on sapling, validity and so on, and still give wildly different from another methodology which was similarly robust. (Could this provide a clue to where the opinion polls went wrong? Could we try a radically different methodology next time?)

Following on from Milgram's experiment, Earls then examines the models of influence: how we are all influenced, by whom, and in what way. He thoughtfully considers various descriptions of the types of people who are "influential" (though the definition of influential remains somewhat shrouded). There is the Opinion Leader approach - where one in fifteen are "social influencers". There is the "early adopters" model. Malcolm Gladwell has his ideas. Earls doesn't conclude in favour of any one approach - or against any for that matter; personally, I think that you can't just define what an influencer looks or sounds or behaves like - it simply depends on the situation. Opinion Leader talk about MPs, CEOs and community leaders. That all seems a bit predictable to me. I'd say it's much more of a social personality thing: in my experience, those people who are natural leaders and natural influencers within social spheres are the most exuberant, most outgoing, funniest, most interesting people. They're the ones who are good at everything - from rugby to pub quizzes - and don't waste a minute of their time lying around on the sofa but are involved in loads of activities (although they always seem to be good at computer games too, ironically). The ones with god jobs and attractive partners (they're probably attractive themselves, too; good genes, I suppose). In other words, the ones you're jealous of. The ones who suggest a trip to the pub and the rest follow. The ones everyone else is jealous, and wants to be like, and wants to copy. Is it possible to pinpoint what sets these people apart? I don't know. This does, however, extend to internet forums, where again there are influencers and leaders; this does not correlate with post counts. It's something I might write a post on at a later date.

The next couple of chapters of Herd fade away very slightly, with a rather forgettable discussions on word-of-mouth marketing - although I wholeheartedly agree that buzz isn't something you can conjure up, and that half of these word of mouth, buzz and social media "conversation" agencies are charlatans. A slightly sanctimonious chapter saying "just be yourself" follows; presumably this was the chapter where Earls convinced his publisher that this was really a marketing book rather than a popular science one, as there are quite a few case studies. Again, however, while a little predictable in its ideas (make good products, be nice and smiley to everyone and everything will be OK) it's written in a gripping style. He defines a "Belief Business" as one which applies its ideals across all forms of its operations. He gives several examples; the most obvious one that  can think of in my experience is The Lexi cinema. Run by volunteers, with all its profits going to charity, it's not just for the bleeding hearts - it's a lovely comfortable interior with great decor, friendly staff, a bar (yes, you can take in your pint), no ads, a personal introduction to the film by one of the friendly staff...all in all, it's easily the best cinema in London (and 10 minutes walk from me to boot). The damage is a tenner a time, but the overall experience is so far removed from the nearest alternative (the multiplex on the North Circular) that it's worth every penny. The Lexi has been cited before as a social media case study (not sure where the article is or who wrote it but suffice to say that their Facebook and Twitter pages are active, conversational, multilateral and give you plenty of reasons to follow them).

Earls is back on compelling form when talking about co-creativity - with countless examples, across platforms and industries (and outside industry!), of group collaboration proving to be more effective than one "genius". His nineteenth century engineering example was particularly strong; more up to date was his discussion of co-creativity in the software industry. Perhaps he missed the two more obvious examples of collaboration in the technological world: APIs, where programs and applications such as Twitter and Google Chrome are opened up, allowing developers to create extensions and tools to really enhance the user experience; and of course the ultimate co-creative project, Wikipedia. There are plenty of academic studies on the wiki phenomenon out there so I won't embarrass myself - but I will point you in the direction of one of the most interesting articles on Wikipedia: about its own accuracy.

Herd finishes on a slightly damp note of don't bother defeatism again (hence the slight tailing off of my enjoyment graph!) but I found myself coming away with more and more examples of group Herd behaviour flooding into my head, and am in serious danger of considering myself a disciple.

One example that always gets to me, although not strictly an exercise in herd behaviour (it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to), is choosing who to sit next to on the bus. If you go upstairs and each two-person seat has exactly one person sitting on it...how do you choose where to sit? Now don't say "random". There will be some sort of reason. Perhaps there's a simple rule you take: the front seat, or the one closest to the stairs. But let's say you don't. OK, if you've got the whole bus to choose from, then certain people rule themselves out straight away: those sporting loud headphones, gross obesity, and cans of special brew are unlikely to have their adjacent space taken away from them early on. But then who? Trying to deconstruct my own subconscious, I think I aim for someone as neutral and bland as possible, someone who is unlikely to make a fuss, someone who keeps their stuff on their side of the seat, someone who won't make a big deal of getting out. I don't think I'm fussed by male or female...although if I decide to sit next to a woman, it can't be the most attractive one there (too obvious), although I'll err on the attractive side of average if possible. It'll probably be someone of nondescript age (ie middle-aged). And although consciously I would never choose on racial grounds, having read Schelling I'd love to know statistically/historically whether my seating habits are biased towards white people. They probably are. Incidentally, as a schoolkid, I always used to get paranoid if I was the last person to be sat next to. In truth, I probably still do.

I could go on all day providing examples. Just the other day I was in Edinburgh at the festival (I've put some reviews up here). I went to see stand-up comic Stephen K Amos - one of the better and more dependable middle-of-the-road comedians in this country. At one point, a bloke got up noisily to go to the toilet; when he was gone, Amos decided to try a little experiment in herd behaviour (or peer pressure as he put it). He briefed us on what to do, and when the chap came back with a newly empty bladder, Amos casually said "now, c'mon folks, let's be honest here. How many of you used to pick your nose and eat it when you were younger?" As one, we put our hands up...and, sure enough, chappie's hand went up with the rest, whereupon he was stitched up royally by Amos, to his embarrassment (and our mirth).

Mark is a constant critic of the traditional focus group - his arguments perhaps point to weaknesses in even the latest trendy research-by-crowdsourcing and online communities (MROCs) - that they are artificially created and therefore can never be a place to watch true, natural interactions between people. But there is a difference between online communities and focus groups and that is timescales. Scientists can create artificial environments very easily - whether it's artificial reefs or contrived forests - and, although nature will take a while to adapt, in time the relationships between creatures and plants will adjust as normal. Hell, Big Brother was a great concept at first, and no matter how much the producers contrive to force increasingly incompatible and decreasingly interesting people who they think will be good for a fight/shag/ratings (delete as appropriate), even in a short space of time true human emotions, relationships and frailties poke out from under the veneer - and thanks to the camera work of Tony Gregory and his team, every glimpse, every pained expression, every faltering relationship will be captured on film (although, of course, the editing reduces it all to fighting, shagging and ratings). If left alone, a garden will start to sprout weeds and brambles and similarly, now matter how artificial an online community is at first, if left alone, the true insight can appear. Weeds and brambles encourage the real money shot back garden wildlife like bees, mice and foxes; perhaps if left to go to weed, online communities can also provide that rich interaction of the type that Mark Earls thinks is so elusive.

My mum (like my dad, also a shrink; breakfast-table conversations could be quite stressful) was talking to me the other day about a conference organised by the Tavistock Institute she attended in Leicester many years ago. Ironically, it's a conference on group behaviour; she told me that what was fascinating was the way that over the course of the week-long conference, groups, factions and schisms grew naturally - which all began with a rather heated discussion between the smokers and non-smokers at the conference. In the space of a few days, delegates had clustered together around natural leader-types, to the extent that cross-group interaction was almost non-existent.

"An indispensible manual for the Web 2.0 era" extols Matthew D'Ancona in the list of endorsements on the back cover. Would I be right in thinking that D'Ancona has missed the point of the book entirely? The "Web 2.0 era" isn't something new, and nothing has changed about the way people interact and behave. The behaviour just manifests itself more clearly. Opinions, trends, and the propagation of content and views can just be traced quantitatively much more easily.

Herd could be described as the Da Vinci Code of marketing. It relies a little too heavily on shock tactics, the writing style is an acquired taste, and it draws some conclusions that might be distinctly dodgy, but damn, it's good fun getting there: you'll gobble it up page after page, and come out on the other side feeling quite liberated, with some pretty major questions in your mind about how human beings work, and whether our communications efforts could all be in vain. One of those rare things that might actually justify the description "essential".