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!

Next: Stories

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WTF is social? Human Completeness

This blog is the first part of a series. 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.

What do we mean by "man is a social animal"? May be we mean cooperation as the first sign of being a social animal, but in that case we are not alone. Monkeys live in groups and so do Elephants. Ants and Bees are social genetically, we are social by necessity and perhaps now by choice. When we say social, we mean something positive, something good. This article explores the dark side of social and how the scale of human societies makes it impossible to comprehend it. 

Human Completeness 

Social is everywhere and it might not be an overstatement to say that social is all we have as a species. One way to understand the “social” is to think about it as the special ability of the human brain to understand other humans. Our brains are hard wired to know and anticipate what others are going to say, going to do. Judging comes naturally to us. Just like we have Turing completeness for automata (Turing machine can simulate every computer and any Turning machine can simulate any other Turing machine), we can think of this ability, faculty as a way for one human to simulate a different person and predict behaviour, actions, thoughts, feelings, motives, etc. Let’s call this Human Completeness. I don’t want to use the term empathy here because it has moral connotations. This ability is as useful to deal with friends as it is for dealing with enemies. 

Note that this ability is not necessarily post language (point in time in evolution when humans started using language ) in fact I will argue that this ability was prerequisite for the language to emerge in the first place. Humans must have lived without language and still be able to understand and communicate with each other in their own groups for a long time before language emerged. Many other species apart from humans are social without having language. Was it “social” that caused our brains to grow larger? R.I.M. Dunbar has done some excellent research on this subject, famous for Dunbar’s Number (150), the limit of human mind to maintain social relationships. The research investigates the brain sizes to body ratio for human ancestors from 7 million years ago, till the emergence of Homo Sapiens. Humans are different from other primates because they have unusual capacity to be social and maintain large number of relationships compared to any other species, thanks to our large brains.  

Surviving Social 

Living in groups is a super power but I think that being social is a double edged sword. Ability to coordinate and live in groups gives us a better chance of survival but that same ability makes it dangerous to survive in groups unless we know how to manage our relationships well enough. Others humans in our own groups must have been so dangerous to our survival that evolution had to give us large brains to make and maintain relationships. Nature and evolution waste nothing. Everything has a reason and the reason is mostly survival. Ability and skills matters but it is the understanding of the fabric of relationships which is key to survival in social. Ants and Bees are social, but their social structure is genetic. This lack of flexibility somehow constraints their ability to solve many environment problems. Humans on the other hand have flexible ways to arrange their social structure to solve individual and group survival problems.   To leave everything to the genetically selected Queen doesn't requires workers to have big brains, but the social for humans is a different ball game all together and evolutionary superior. Being in the group is just a start, living in the group is the difficult part. 

Other thing to understand is that social is a winning idea in the story of evolution. People who were not social, not that they hated other people but may be were bad at or ignored spending time in learning about others must have vanished from earth. Either eaten by wild animals or hunted by other humans who were social. Social is necessary for survival. The story of social is simply the story of how to survive it. Surviving against predators and other tribes is important, but that must have been a smaller problem. All we need is the ability to take orders and discipline, just like ants and bees. Social is about challenges we face in peace within our groups. May be our idea of fair come for this stage of evolution when we started to live in groups without any rules. It is the act of defining fair that defeats its purpose and makes it something legal. This was probably a world like Lord of the Flies. A world beyond good and evil, where all that matters is what others think about you and how well you can predict it. How do you fit in and when do you take a stand?  It is a flexible world where some can gang up and kill you while you are alone plucking fruits. A world without rights and wrongs, fickle, unpredictable with nothing to protect you from your fellow humans except how well you understand them. Sounds familiar? Not much has changed. 

States and the rise of Anti-Social 

For anti-social to survive we need state, police, judiciary etc to guaranty safety and equality before law. Social inherently means no equality, because equality simply abuses the most important human faculty and declares it useless. State and its systems are artless, naive. Social means knowing your place in the group, in every subset of your group, exploiting or submitting, fighting or fleeting, knowing well what you must tolerate and what you must not, to ensure survival. Social is surviving other humans because isolated we don't have much chance anyway. It is the lesser of the evils.  May be the answer to the question: "will you jump off the cliff if everyone is doing so" is clearly "yes". Isolation is death for a social animal because it doesn't knows how to survive alone.   

Take a pause and think about your social circle and sub-circles. What is permissible and not permissible to talk about in which circle and what are the consequences? Can you teach your boss? Can you bully your siblings/coworkers? Which ones? Can you cry your way with someone? Congratulations! You have learned well. 

Key things to remember: we are hard wired to understand people and there is a limit on the number of people we can truly understand. The limit is 150 (Dunbar's Number) and that is a maximum limit. The only way to reach this limit is when we spend lots of time with people, talking or doing things together so that we truly understand them. If we don't spend the time, our individual limits will be much smaller. Social is a symbiotic relationship between the individual and the group, made up of the relationships between members of the group. A group without free relationships between its members is not a social group, but organisation. We contribute to social by being social. We survived millions of years without tools, wheel, fire, agriculture, money, language, states etc by just being social. Social "technology" is our mightiest weapon of survival not science or arts or technology.  

Note that this limit is not on number of people we can remember by face. That number is in the range of 1500-2000. So yes we can know probably 10X more people by face, but what we know about them will be very shallow. Even the number 150 is on the higher side and can be subdivided further. The table below is from the Book: Thinking Big - How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Brain by Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar. 

• Close Intimates              5
• Best Friends                   15
• Good Friends                 50
• Friends                           150
• Near Acquaintances  1500

It is easy to see how scale decreases the depth of relationships. It is true, deep relationships take time and perhaps only time. Face saving is important, but only at scale. Your best friends love you inspite of everything. They just happen to know you at far greater granularity than others. 

Social brain has interesting implications on many areas of our lives. So much of what is happening around us can be explained by looking at the size of the societies we live in and inability of the human brain to comprehend it. Communication technologies which increase the size or number of groups we have to deal with, which alter the feedback mechanisms of the group communication, have profound impact on the kind of society it becomes. 

Now that we have some idea of the key principle, let's try to see if this can explain some phenomenon in the real world. I have split this blog into multiple separate sections. They are listed below with their separate links.  Each of the these sections take up some of the things we find in the world and try to analyse it from the point of view of the Human Completeness ability. I will encourage you to read all of them, especially the last one: The conclusion.  

1. Why do we love Gossip?
2. Why is human brain wired to love Stories? 
3. Why Brands matter? Why don't people just sort by price or features? 
4. Subtle art of making you love or hate anyone - Media and Politics
5. Modern Stress and the increasing costs of keeping your shit together 
6. Are Stereotypes a modern phenomenon? Role of broadcasting technologies on relationship quality 
7. Religion is futile. Long live the religion 
8. Sorry Babu. Being human at scale is mostly a scam. 
9. Curse of Specialization or why pursuit of efficiency cannot be only goal for a society 
10. The conclusion: Anti-Social is not anti social 

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