Tag : behaviour

I saw Mark Earls talk at Planningness in Brooklyn: How to understand and create social influence, and since then I have found myself thinking a lot about the video of the dancing man at the Sasquatch Music Festival that he showed us.

Mark's talk was about Social Learning. The basic premise, people learn through observation - a phenomenon he was able to demonstrate with an eager audience. Mark has described this type of open social 'copying' at a group level as:

The engine by which stuff gets pulled through populations, from technology to health habits

And the point he makes about the Sasquatch dancing man is how it's NOT about the intervention of influencers, but rather it's about everyone reacting to the growing crowd in a kind of  cascade. The video made me think more about the way we should try and design social spaces to be more open - possibly open enough to allow people to lose themselves in the crowd. It seems to me that being able to lose even a little a bit of your 'self' within a semi-chaotic social experience is a type of primal joy that everyone - everyone except the lone nut - enjoys.

Stumbled on on this very interesting article titled “Is Happiness catching?” in The New York Times published the day after my write up on John Cacioppo’s talk at the RSA on how loneliness is contagious.

The article is based on Christakis and Fowler’s research on the National Heart Institute’s Framingham Heart Study. 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants have been followed since 1948 to learn about cardiovascular disease – but two years ago, Christakis and Fowler used the very same data set to analyze if people can influence each other’s behaviour just by socializing.