WTF is social? Stereotypes

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.

Stereotypes 

Why do ads and jokes use stereotypes? First of all stereotypes are a modern phenomenon. It is a term first used to describe something completely technical in printing process. One of the key features of stereotypes is that they are widely understood. We don't label our friends and family members with stereotypes and if we do, it must be a really hard relationship. Some people can afford to do that, if they enjoy lots of power in the relationship or if they have no reason to maintain that relationship.  

What stereotypes do is that they activate and stimulate our social brain. Given the time (30 seconds ad), that is all marketing people can do to get our attention. Why do we believe in stereotypes? That is all we can do within our social brain limits. It is hard and even impossible to think and consider every thing about everyone. We just have to deal with too many people in the modern world. Some of them are real people we actually meet, but some of them are pure fiction created by the broadcasting  communication. Cartoons and caricatures work because our brain supply the rest of the details. Stereotypes work the same way. We bring them to life with our experience. They will break as soon as we have to debate them with our friends, but on a one way broadcast they are never questioned and skip the test of normal socially created reality.   

Let's add stereotypes to the list of some of the slots that are already taken in the brain. It is no wonder we miss the human connection in our interactions. There are not many slots left nor much time left to fill them to any decent depth. Stereotypes are just simplifications created by us to cope up with the scale of the societies we are now forced to live in. It is practically impossible to be human at scale. 

Next: Religion

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WTF is social? Media and Politics

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.

Media & Politics 

Let's get into the media business a bit. Why do people care about a child stuck in a well more than statistics on number of people who died in second world war? There is no pain in statistics. Being able to be pained by statistics is a special faculty of the brain and perhaps only as old as numbers (few thousand years max).  It needs to be inculcated and developed. It needs imagination that is not universal. It is inhuman for normal social brain humans. I almost wept when I reduced context switches from  150K to 200 when building a multi-threaded non-blocking http proxy. The social brain can only detect pain in other people, not numbers. We have been feeling pain of other humans for millions of years. 

The key to social brain is personification - the act of making a thing or a system appear like a person. And as a corollary, the key to suppress humanity in a person is de-personification - the act of labelling or suggesting a person is not worthy of being called a person - perhaps an insect, or a virus or a poison or a thing. Enimification is similar to de-personification except the person remains a person but evil and localised enough so that at least in imagination can be defeated in one move. It is stupid to term anything undefeatable as enemy like global warming. All you get is smirks.

 The only thing we can assume that every human can understand is the pain and happiness of other humans. This makes selling things as person and persons as things, the main business of mass media and politics. Media keeps changing but the politics is the same - tricking the social brain into making people into things and things into people. Being together is not enough. That is just the first step. Surviving each other is the real test of survival, just like marriage. 

Next: Stress

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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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WTF is social? Gossip

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. 

Gossip 

It is hard to keep quiet for a group of people. We even have an expression for when that doesn't happen. It is called awkward silence. Put some people who know each other in a room and it will be full of whispers and whooshing and swishing and laughter. People love to talk and especially talk about other people. That talk is called Gossip.  Ask people to talk about climate change or economic policy and we can hear yawning. You may notice above average urge to urinate among the participants. Some will just start feeling unquenchably thirsty. 

Why do we love gossip? We love it so much that we are willing to skip most parts of lectures and meetings. Why do employees who will normally keep quiet in company all hands, all of a sudden become vocal by the time they reach the water cooler. The evolutionary answers always have to do something with survival. Somehow people who gossip survived and not those who didn't. How can gossip help is survive?  In a fair, equal, caring world gossip doesn't help. If you don't know something, people will just point it out to you. Gossip helps when knowing small things can make a big difference. And that happens when social interactions are complicated, full on land mines and thorny issues, which if touched or not properly conducted can lead to lots of unfavourable outcomes. 

Social is full of power difference and inequality and the willingness to use it effectively to maintain it. Without gossip we have no way to know how to deal with new people or adjust our behaviour with people we already know to better match our behaviour with what is going on with other peoples lives. Gossip is essential to survival, to maintain relationships. Gossiping not only strengthens the relationships between those who gossip, but also keeps us aware of other things that we must know, the ones that are not written in the manual.  

Information has a way of disseminating. Say it loud and no one listens. Paste it on notice boards, send emails and no one reads. Not everything is discussable in every group but the dynamics will change in even sub group of the same group. If you can't tell it to your best friend, then you will not discuss it in any group of size greater than two. As we add more people to any group, the number of things that can be discussed decreases. We call it word of mouth, but sharing of WhatsApp in a 180 member group is not a word of mouth. May be one to one or perhaps one to two or three or four. After that we don't really need to listen to whatever is being said. The stakes get so large after that group size that most communication needs to be meticulously calculated.  Gossip happens to people in groups where trust exists. It is not that people don't have opinions, they inherently know with whom to share and when. Gossip is an act of trust and friendship. For information to become widely shared and become credible it needs to pass through the many such gossip groups at different trust levels before it will become widely known. Gossip is where information is dissected and assimilated by social animal. 

We are supposed to gossip and it is good for us. At least that is what evolution wanted us to do.  Gossip is the lifeblood of social fabric and definitely not a waste of time. Gossip takes you more places than whatever else you might think is more important.

Call it bitching or doging, gossip thou must!

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