i’ll have what she’s having: mapping social behavior

How we learn from those around us: an essential guide to understanding how people behave.

Humans are, first and foremost, social creatures. And this, according to the authors of I’ll Have What She’s Having, shapes--and explains--most of our choices. We’re not just blindly driven by hard-wired instincts to hunt or gather or reproduce; our decisions are based on more than ＂nudges＂ exploiting individual cognitive quirks.

I’ll Have What She’s Having shows us how we use the brains of others to think for us and as storage space for knowledge about the world. The story zooms out from the individual to small groups to the complexities of populations. It describes, among other things, how buzzwords propagate and how ideas spread; how the swine flu scare became an epidemic; and how focused social learning by a few gets amplified as copying by the masses. It describes how ideas, behavior, and culture spread through the simple means of doing what others do.

It is notoriously difficult to change behavior. For every ＂Yes We Can＂ political slogan, there are thousands of ＂Just Say No＂ buttons. I’ll Have What She’s Having offers a practical map to help us navigate the complex world of social behavior, an essential guide for anyone who wants to understand how people behave and how to begin to change things.

R. Alexander Bentley is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).

Mark Earls is a London-based author and consultant on marketing, communication, and behavior change.

Michael J. O’Brien is Provost and Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and the coauthor of I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).

An internationally recognized leader at the intersection of design and technology, John Maeda is Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He was the 16th President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Named by Esquire as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st Century, he has appeared as a speaker all over the world, from Davos to Beijing to São Paulo to New York, and his talks for TED.com have received millions of views. He is the author of Design by Numbers, The Laws of Simplicity, and Redesigning Leadership, all published by the MIT Press.