2020 Starling Bookshelf

“Germs are not the only things that spread from person to person. Behaviors also spread."

"Interconnections between people give rise to phenomena that are not present in individuals or reducible to their solitary desires and actions. Indeed, culture is one such phenomenon."

Thanks to Nicholas Christakis for contributing to our 2019 Compendium. You can read his piece here.

“Passed from peron to person, dishonesty has a slow, creeping, socially erosive effect. As the 'virus' mutates and spreads from one person to another, a new, less ethical code of conduct develops."

"The idea that dishonesty can be transmitted from person to person via social contagion suggests that we need to take a different approach to curbing dishonesty."

“The effects of exposure to peer behaviors are roughly the same size as the influence of genes on behavior or IQ on academic performance."

"By combining the influence model with a measure of exposure to peers' behaviors, or a measure of social strength tie, we can produce useful predictions of the likelihood that an individual will adopt a particular behavior."

“[O]ur impressive ability to make sense of behavior we have observed does not imply a corresponding ability to predict it… It is this difference between making sense of behavior and predicting it that is responsible for many of the failures of commonsense reasoning. And if this difference poses difficulties for dealing with individual behavior, the problem only gets more pronounced when dealing with the behavior of groups."

“In economics and in the remainder of the social sciences as well, the translation from individual to aggregate behavior is the key analytical problem. Yet in these disiplines the exact nature and sources of individual behavior are rarely considered."

"People expect from the social sciences... the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future. They want the power to predict."

“[T]here is a chasm between our scientific knowledge of networks as drivers of human behavior and what the general public and policymakers know."

First, a few primary features of networks yield enormous insight into why humans behave the way they do. Second, these features are simple, intuitive, and quantifiable. Third, human activity exhibits regularities..."

“We have not evolved simply to live in undifferentiated groups like herds of cattle; we have evolved to live in networks in which we have specific connections to other individuals whom we come to know, love, and like."

"[W]hen it comes to our way of living socially, we are more similar than different."

Thanks to Nicholas Christakis for contributing to our 2019 Compendium. You can read his piece here.

“History and evolutionary anthropology tell the same sad story."

"[C]apital punishment emerged with language in the midPleistocene. Afterward, an individual who challenged the dominant culture could be in mortal danger."

"When the risk of being a nonconformist is that you will be executed, it is easy to imagine intense selection in favor of moral sensibilities that maintain you as part of the in-group.”

“Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive... When we discover we are out of step with everyone else, our amygdalae spasm with anxiety, our memories are revised, and our sensory-processing regions are even pressured to experience what is not true. All to fit in."

“Our brains evolved to experience threats to our social connections in much the same way as they experience physical pain."

"Whether employees realize it or not, they have been wired to be motivated by being accepted and valued by the groups they are socially connected with."

“Many people associate morals with the responsibilities arising from ... group membership."

"While morals are part of the reason we cooperate with each other, the preponderance of the evidence—both observational and experimental—supports the hypothesis that we cooperate primarily because we crave reward (engagement) and fear punishment (exclusion) from other members of our group.”

“In every social context, people have a notion of who they are, which is associated with beliefs about how they and others are supposed to behave."

"Effective management encourages workers to be insiders, who identify with the goals of the firm." "But many studies have found that workers typically identify with their immediate workgroup rather than with the organization as a whole."

“We can define a community as a supermind where decisions are made by informal consensus or according to shared norms, both of which are enforced through reputations and access to resources."

"It turns out that groups have scientifically measureable properties, just as individual humans do."

"[N]ew information technologies are changing the political calculus of how to organize large groups."

“While our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns."

"While noticing similarities between natural systems and human designs has a long history, it has always been difficult to move beyond the metaphors to quantify these analogies. Lately, networks have become the X-ray machines of our connectedness..."

“We each have a distinctive signature, rather like a fingerprint, in how we distribute our social capital (time and emotional effort) across the individuals in our extended social networks— so much so that this pattern is preserved even when there is considerable turnover in network membership...”

Our thanks go to Robin Dunbar for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“[N]o country can hope to live peacefully and prosperously unless it finds ways to reconcile its citizens to mutual trust."

"Only if we are alive to the way in which trust is taken and given in the various arenas that make up modern society will we be able to use the institutions in which trust remains healthy to cure the deficiency of the institutions in which trust has decayed."

“In the absence of trust, what are often fairly complex systems must be put in place to protect against exploitation and opportunism and to produce close monitoring and effective sanctioning. Even the law is a blunt instrument that cannot efficiently produce the kind of social order that comes from the existence of trusting relations in a group or society."

“Once organizational networks can be measured, they can be controlled."

"[B]y understanding the network structure of a population, we can discover new ways to control the flow of behaviors across it."

"The most important implication here is that managers can design organizational networks to provide a structural foundation for accelerating the dynamics of change."

Our thanks to Damon Centola for Contributing to our 2022 Compendium and our 2021 Compendium. You can read his pieces here (2022) and here (2021).

“[I]n philosophy, in the sciences, in art, and specifically within complexity theory, emergence now refers to a very specific process: one in which simple interactions among individual parts or agents form complex behaviors and patterns at the system level."

"Designing for emergence is about understanding the propensities of the context and designing with and for those propensities."

Our thanks to Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown for their contribution to our 2021 Compendium. You can read their piece here.

“Upstream work is about reducing the probability that problems will happen, and for that reason, the work must culminate in systems change. Because systems are the source of those probabilities. To change the system is to change the rules that govern us or the culture that influences us."