Copycats and Contrarians

by Michelle Baddeley

24. Gustav Jahoda (2004), ‘Henri Tajfel’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press; Stephen Reicher, ‘Biography of Henri Tajfel (1919–1982)’, European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jnu-psychology/zWK4S-ClSc0 (accessed 7 September 2017). ‘Obituary: Henri Tajfel’ (1982), British Journal of Social Psychology 21(3), pp. 185–8.

  25. For a survey of the minimal group paradigm concept, see Michael Diehl (1990), ‘The Minimal Group Paradigm: Theoretical Explanations and Empirical Findings’, European Review of Social Psychology 1(1), pp. 263–92.

  26. See for example Henri Tajfel (1970), ‘Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination’, Scientific American 223, pp. 96–102; Henri Tajfel, M.G. Billig, R.P. Bundy and Claude Flament (1971), ‘Social Categorization and Intergroup Behaviour’, European Journal of Social Psychology 1(2), pp. 149–78.

  27. The economists Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Daniel Zizzo have explored some of these group influences from a group perspective using behavioural economics experiments; see Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap and Daniel John Zizzo (2009), ‘The Value of Groups’, American Economic Review 99(1), pp. 295–323.

  28. Hipster mavericks are not new – the term ‘hipster’ was originally used in the context of 1940s jazz rebels in the US.

  29. Ezra Klein (2015), ‘On Paul Krugman’s Theory of Hipsters’, Vox, 27 July. http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9049025/paul-krugman-hipsters (accessed 7 September 2017).

  30. Scientists have demonstrated that alcohol is associated with greater impulsivity and risk-taking; see for example Luca Corazzini, Antonio Filippin and Paolo Vanin (2015), ‘Economic Behaviour under the Influence of Alcohol: An Experiment on Time Preferences, Risk-Taking, and Altruism’, PLoS ONE 10(4). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121530 (accessed 7 September 2017).

  31. Mark Levine, Robert Lowe, Rachel Best and Derek Heim (2012), ‘“We Police It Ourselves”: Group Processes in the Escalation and Regulation of Violence in the Night-Time Economy’, European Journal of Social Psychology 42, pp. 924–32.

  32. Levine, Lowe, Best and Heim (2012), p. 927.

  33. Levine, Lowe, Best and Heim (2012).

  34. David Stout (1996), ‘Obituary: Solomon Asch is Dead at 88; A Leading Social Psychologist’, New York Times, 29 February. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/29/us/solomon-asch-is-dead-at-88-a-leading-social-psychologist.html (accessed 7 September 2017).

  35. See for example Solomon Asch (1955), ‘Opinions and Social Pressure’, Scientific American 193(5), pp. 31–5. For a metaanalysis of experiments exploring the line judgement task, see Rod Bond and Peter B. Smith (1996), ‘Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of the Studies Using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task’, Psychological Bulletin 119(1), pp. 111–37.

  36. Asch’s experiments capture something similar to experiments exploring conformity conducted by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif. He analysed social influences on people’s perceptions of the ‘autokinetic effect’: when people are shown a light in a darkened room, they will mistakenly think that it is moving. Sherif found that, when he asked his experimental participants to announce estimates of how far the dots had travelled, the participants’ estimates converged. See Muzafer Sherif (1935), A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception, New York: Archives of Psychology, No. 187. http://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Influence_Compliance/Sherif_A_Study_of_Some_Social_Factors_(1935)_Arch%20Psych.pdf (accessed 30 October 2017).

  37. Robert J. Shiller (1995), ‘Conversation, Information and Herd Behavior’, American Economic Review 85(2), pp. 181–5.

  38. Solomon Asch (1952), Social Psychology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 464.

  39. A. Bandura, D. Ross and S.A. Ross (1961), ‘Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive Models’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63, pp. 575–82.

  40. There are a number of academic papers exploring these and similar findings; see for example Hunt Allcott (2011), ‘Social Norms and Energy Conservation’, Journal of Public Economics 95(9–10), pp. 1082–95; and Hunt Allcott and Todd Rogers (2014), ‘The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Behavioral Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation’, American Economic Review 104(10), pp. 3003–37.

  41. These social ‘nudges’, as developed and promoted by the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, have been in the spotlight of recent policy debates and controversies; see for example Kate Palmer (2014), ‘Psychology and “Nudges”: Five Tricks the Taxman Uses to Make You Pay £210m Extra’, Daily Telegraph, 9 October. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/11147321/Five-tricks-or-nudges-HMRC-uses-to-make-you-pay–210m-extra.html (accessed 7 September 2017); and Tamsin Rutter (2015), ‘The Rise of Nudge – The Unit Helping Politicians to Fathom Human Behaviour’, Guardian, 23 July. https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jul/23/rise-nudge-unit-politicians-human-behaviour (accessed 7 September 2017).

  42. Subhrendu Pattanayak, Jui-Chen Yang, Katherine L. Dickinson, Christine Poulos, Sumeet R. Patil, Ranjan K. Mallick, Jonathan L. Blitstein and Purujit Praharaj (2009), ‘Shame or Subsidy Revisited: Social Mobilization for Sanitation in Orissa, India’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87, pp. 580–7.

  3 Herding on the brain

  1. Plato, Phaedrus, 246a–254e.

  2. Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec (2005), ‘Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics’, Journal of Economic Literature 43(1), p. 9.

  3. Daniel Kahneman (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, develops earlier insights from modern neuroscience, as well as economics. He notes (p. 450) that the terms ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’ are borrowed from Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West (2000), ‘Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, pp. 645–65. Other earlier work on similar themes includes Walter Schneider and Richard M. Shiffrin (1977), ‘Controlled and Automatic Human Information Processing: Perceptual Learning, Automatic Attending and a General Theory’, Psychological Review 84(2), pp. 127–90; and Paul M. Romer (2000), ‘Thinking and Feeling’, American Economic Review 90(2), pp. 439–43. For an earlier outline of Daniel Kahneman’s systems model, see also Daniel Kahneman (2003), ‘Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics’, American Economic Review 93(5), pp. 1449–75. For a simple introduction to dual process thinking, see Scott Barry Kaufman and Jerome L. Singer (2012), ‘The Creativity of Dual Process “System 1” Thinking’, Scientific American guest blog. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-creativity-of-dual-process-system–1-thinking/ (accessed 7 September 2017).

  4. Kahneman (2011), p. 25.

  5. More controversially, some modern neuroscientists make a distinction between left-brain and right-brain dominance, with the left associated with more logical, mathematical styles of thinking, and the right associated with more emotional, creative styles of thinking. See Iain McGilchrist (2009), The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

  6. Charles G. Gross (1998), ‘Galen and the Squealing Pig’, History of Neuroscience 4(3), pp. 216–21.

  7. Gross (1998).

  8. Le Bon (1895), pp. 13–14.

  9. Stanley Finger (2001), Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function, Oxford University Press.

  10. Galen’s surgery on pigs and their vocal cords was an example of ancient experimental evidence that our thinking is controlled from our brains. Cited in Gross (1998), p. 218.

  11. John Martyn Harlow (1868), ‘Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar Through the Head’, Publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society 2, pp. 327–47; republished in M.B. Macmillan (2002), An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See also Steve Twomey (2010), ‘Phineas Gage: Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient’, Smithsonian Magazine, January. https://www.smi
thsonianmag.com/history/phineas-gage-neurosciences-most-famous-patient-11390067/ (accessed 22 October 2017).

  12. Antonio Damasio (1994/2006), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, London: Vintage.

  13. Confidence in fMRI techniques is undermined by recent evidence that it is associated with too many false positives. In other words, there are lots of statistically significant findings which may be spurious, simply a result of the techniques. For example, Anders Eklund and colleagues found a false positive rate of 70 per cent in their fMRI analyses; see Anders Eklund, Thomas E. Nichols and Hans Knutsson (2016), ‘Cluster Failure: Why fMRI Inferences for Spatial Extent Have Inflated False-Positive Rates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113(28), pp. 7900–5.

  14. Wim De Neys, Oshin Vartanian and Vinod Goel (2008), ‘Smarter Than We Think: When Our Brains Detect That We Are Biased’, Psychological Science 19(5), pp. 483–9.

  15. For the original Engineer-Lawyer study, see Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1973), ‘On the Psychology of Prediction’, Psychological Review 80, pp. 237–51.

  16. For a layperson’s introduction to some neuroscientific evidence about social instincts, explored in the context of a range of modern issues and problems, see Peter Bazalgette (2017), The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society, London: John Murray.

  17. The pioneering neuroeconomist Colin Camerer and colleagues have outlined the key ideas underlying neuroeconomics in useful survey articles; see for example Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec (2004), ‘Neuroeconomics: Why Economics Needs Brains’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 106(3), pp. 555–79; and Camerer, Loewenstein and Prelec (2005). See also Michelle Baddeley (2013), Behavioural Economics and Finance, Abingdon: Routledge, ch. 3: ‘Foundations: Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics’, pp. 30–47.

  18. See Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and P. Read Montague (1997), ‘A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward’, Science 275(5306), pp. 1593–9; and Wolfram Schultz (2002), ‘Getting Formal with Dopamine and Reward’, Neuron 36, pp. 241–63.

  19. For a simple introduction to the concepts see Wolfram Schultz (2007), ‘Reward Signals’, Scholarpedia 2(6), p. 2184. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Reward_signals (accessed 30 October 2017).

  20. Other similar studies include a series of imaging experiments led by Vasily Klucharev, a neuroscientist based at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Netherlands. With his colleagues, Klucharev has connected the idea of conformity with reinforcement learning, linking with some of Shultz’s ideas about reward prediction error. See Vasily Klucharev, Kaisa Hytönen, Mark Rijpkema, Ale Smidts and Guillén Fernández (2009), ‘Reinforcement Learning Signal Predicts Social Conformity’, Neuron 61(1), pp. 140–51. For an introduction to some of the key connections between the economic and neuroscientific literature about social emotions driving herding, see Michelle Baddeley (2010), ‘Herding, Social Influence and Economic Decision-Making: Socio-Psychological and Neuroscientific Analyses’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365(1538), pp. 281–90.

  21. The images of the faces were generated from a face bank. The faces did not have hair – different hairstyles can apparently distort our assessment of the reliability of a person’s judgement. We incorporated an additional control scenario in which people were shown faces of monkeys instead of humans, to capture if the participants were responding to any type of face, regardless of whether they could assume that the faces knew anything about share-trading.

  22. Christopher Burke, Michelle Baddeley, Philippe Tobler and Wolfram Schultz (2010), ‘Striatal BOLD Response Reflects the Impact of Herd Information on Financial Decisions’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 4, article 48. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00048 (accessed 5 September 2017).

  23. See Alan G. Sanfey, James K. Rilling, Jessica A. Aronson, Leigh E. Nystrom and Jonathan D. Cohen (2003), ‘The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game’, Science 300, pp. 1755–8. A similar neuroeconomic study of brain activations in the context of decisions that catalyse conflicts between the emotional and the cognitive was conducted by Samuel M. McClure, David I. Laibson, George Loewenstein and John D. Cohen (2004), ‘Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Rewards’, Science 313, pp. 684–7: they studied similar influences in the context of decisions over time, when there is a struggle between our patient and impatient selves.

  24. The ultimatum game was first implemented by Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger and Bernd Schwarze (1982), ‘An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3(4) pp. 367–88. For a cross-cultural study, see Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath (2001), ‘In Search of Homo economicus: Behavioural Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies’, American Economic Review 91(2), pp. 73–8. See also Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath (2004), Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies, Oxford University Press. For a short summary of the ultimatum game and other games used by behavioural economists to pick up pro-social preferences, see Michelle Baddeley (2017), Behavioural Economics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, ch. 3: ‘Social Lives’, pp. 19–33.

  25. Ramsey M. Raafat, Nick Chater and Chris Frith (2009), ‘Herding in Humans’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(10), pp. 420–8.

  26. Herbert Simon is attributed with the first analyses of heuristics – for example, see Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell, ‘Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research’, Operations Research 6(1), pp. 1–10. For early mentions of herding heuristics, see Michelle Baddeley, Demetris Pillas, Yorgos Christopoulos, Wolfram Schultz and Philippe Tobler (2007), ‘Herding and Social Pressure in Trading Tasks: A Behavioural Analysis’, Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0730, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.5145 (accessed 7 September 2017); Baddeley, Curtis and Wood (2004).

  27. See, for example, Gerd Gigerenzer and Daniel Goldstein (1996), ‘Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded Rationality’, Psychological Review 103, pp. 650–9.

  4 Animal herds

  1. Rory Tingle (2016), ‘The Power of the Herd: Thousands of Wildebeest Make It Across a Crocodile-Infested River by Stampeding Together in a Huge Crowd’, Mail Online, 2 August. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3720191/The-power-herd-Thousands-wildebeest-make-crocodile-infested-river-migration-Kenya-Tanzania-stampeding-huge-crowd.html (accessed 7 September 2017).

  2. C. Muro, R. Escobedo, L. Spector and R.P. Coppinger, ‘Wolf-Pack (Canis lupus) Hunting Strategies Emerge from Simple Rules in Computational Simulations’, Behavioural Processes 88(3), pp. 192–7.

  3. For a collection of articles from social neuroscience exploring social learning and related themes, see Steve W.C. Chang and Masaki Isoda (2015), Neural Basis of Social Learning, Social Deciding, and Other-Regarding Preferences, Lausanne: Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/books/Neural_basis_of_social_learning_social_deciding_and_other-regarding_preferences/449 (accessed 20 October 2017).

  4. Étienne Danchin, L.-S. Giraldeau, T.J. Valone and R.H. Wagner (2004), ‘Public Information: From Nosy Neighbours to Cultural Evolution’, Science 305, pp. 487–91.

  5. A. Kis, L. Huber and A. Wilkinson (2015), ‘Social Learning by Imitation in a Reptile (Pogona vitticeps)’, Animal Cognition 18(1), pp. 325–31.

  6. F. Cortesi, W.E. Feeney, J. Marshall and K.L. Cheney (2015), ‘Phenotypic Plasticity Confers Multiple Fitness Benefits to a Mimic’, Current Biology 25, pp. 1–6.

  7. Nicholas B. Davies, John R. Krebs and Stuart A. West (2012), An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology, 4th edn, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, p. 148.

  8. H. Kruuk (1964), ‘Predators and Anti-Predator Behaviour of the Black-Headed Gull Larus ridibundus’,
Behaviour 11, pp. 1–129; D.B.A. Thompson and C.J. Barnard (1983), ‘Anti-Predator Responses in Mixed-Species Associations of Lapwings, Golden Plovers and Black-Headed Gulls’, Animal Behaviour 31(2), pp. 585–93.

  9. K.M. McLennan (2012), ‘Farmyard Friends’, Biologist 59(4), pp. 18–22.

  10. Jonathan D. Cohen (2005), ‘The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions between Cognition and Emotion’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(4), pp. 3–24.

  11. Danchin, Giraldeau, Valone and Wagner (2004).

  12. Corina E. Tarnita, Alex Washburne, Ricardo Martinez-Garcia, Allyson E. Sgro and Simon A. Levin (2015), ‘Fitness Trade-Offs Between Spores and Nonaggregating Cells Can Explain the Coexistence of Diverse Genotypes in Cellular Slime Molds’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(9), pp. 2776–81.

  13. Paul B. Rainey (2015), ‘Precarious Development: The Uncertain Social Life of Cellular Slime Molds’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(9), pp. 2639–40.

  14. See Alan Kirman (1993), ‘Ants, Rationality and Recruitment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 108(1), pp. 137–56.

  15. Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler (2005), ‘Eusociality: Origin and Consequences’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102(38), pp. 13367–71.

  16. Davies, Krebs and West (2012).

  17. Le Bon (1895), p. 11.

  18. Tingle (2016).

  19. For example see Kristen Hawkes, Jonathan F. O’Connell, Nicholas G. Blurton Jones, Helen Alvarez and Eric L. Charnov, ‘Grandmothering, Menopause, and the Evolution of Human Life Histories’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 95(3), pp. 1335–9.

  20. Davies, Krebs and West (2012), pp. 77–8.

  21. Colin Camerer (2003), ‘Strategizing in the Brain’, Science 300, pp. 1673–5.

  22. Richard Dawkins (1976), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press. See also Susan Blackmore (1999), The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press; and Aaron Lynch (1996), Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, New York: Basic Books.