WTF is social? Stories

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Stories 

Why do we like stories? One way to think about them is to treat them as just puzzles and exercises for the social brain. Who is going to do what and why? Who is lying and who is speaking the truth? What will happen next? Stories are equivalent to sports for social brain. Stories are not interesting because of what is in the story but how the story is told and what is likely to happen next and what are the choices left for each character as the story progresses. The most boring stories are those that preach, they have nothing for the social brain. Stories are like chess: opening, middle-game and endgame, each one is important and builds on what has already happened. They train us for social life. The popularity of Reality TV tells us the same thing. It is not the story that matters. It is people, how they behave vs how we think they will behave. We just love to understand and simulate other people's brain inside ours, for good reasons.

This is a bit of a hopeless situation because it tells us simply that politics is the only game in town. Being social and being political are same. We will never be able to eliminate politics from human affairs, not until we make humans something non-humans. The only thing that makes humans human is politics or what I have been referring to as “human completeness” or "social brain" as termed in Dunbar's papers/books. 

Next: Brands

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WTF is social? Brands

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Brands  

Consider branding. One goal of branding is of course being distinct enough, distinguishable but the other part of branding is something like human, trustable, predictable. We trust brands - cheapest, strong, stylish, cute, inspiring, ethical, quality, etc. This is close to insane because Brand is not a person at all. It is a system with bunch of people, many of them not even employed by the company that owns the brand. And this mix of people is not even static. Everyday new people join and retire from these companies, but still we understand them, trust them, as if they were a "person". And that is simply the essence of branding. Brand is like a mini ideology, a coherent value system which seems predictable and relatable, just like a person one has known for a while. And why does it works? Because brains are hardwired to understand people not concepts. Yes people don't understand logic, they don't understand math and they don't understand the power of compounding and they don't understand the traffic rules or tax laws, but it is hard to find people who don't understand other people. To be a brand then is to just behave/appear like a person simply because that is all what all humans brains are designed to understand.   

This makes Richard Branson the smartest person in the world. To make a great brand, just behave like a person, any likeable, enviable, predictable person. Brands exist because of the social brain, which can decide and compare, considering a myriad of factors, of not only the brand, but also its reputation in his own social circle. It might sound as if I am trivialising the problem, but that is not the case. Just look at the size and complexity of the hammer I am using. Social involves suggesting Pareto optimal solutions (Preto optimal means that no member of the group can be made any better unless someone in the group suffers) and finding Nash equilibrium (Nash equilibrium exists in a game when no member can better results by changing his strategy given everyone knows everyone else's strategy) for incomparable and differently valued things all the time. It is possible because everyone knows the full utility function with great granularity for perhaps 150 other people.  

Celebrity Brands should be a thing. It is the most natural kind, easy acceptable to social brain. 

Next: Media and Politics

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