Weekly Blog 10: Social Physics & Switch
Having perused Social Physics by Alex Pentland, I can’t help but think of Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers wrote about five years prior to the publication of their book, but I think many of their recommendations in terms of business and social strategies for change make a lot of sense in terms of Peatland’s work. The Heaths recommend three things for producing change: ‘motivate the elephant’, ‘direct the rider’, and ‘clear the path’. ‘Motivating the elephant’ more or less involves waking the latent potential in everyone for change. ‘Directing the rider’ means generally to encourage the natural restraining tendencies to productively focus on the change hand rather than remaining in fear. ‘Clearing the path’ means removing obstacles that restrict the change process.
To me, Social Physics aligns nicely with these premises. Through the combination of effective social norms and incentives, we can ‘motivate the elephant’ to engage in new forms of engagement and information generation / sharing. We can ‘direct the rider’ to break out of his or her echo chamber or isolation to be more receptive to new information from networks of contrarians who might have strategies that run against the grain of common sense but have significant consensus for being reasonable solutions. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, involves ‘clearing the pathways’ and providing new avenues for sharing that information and creating those same social incentives.
In the context of Pendland’s argument for social physics as a new sort of math that will enable us to develop more valuable social structures, I think this is truly where the rubber meets the road for information policy. Breaking down the obstacles to information sharing apparatus and designing more efficient, value creating enterprises is where information policy can have its best effect. Information policy, at best, should be an enabling capacity, and it can do this best through modes that remove obstacles and incentivizes strong social network performance.
Without getting too specific, but rather focusing on principles, I think we ought to look at information policy as a means rather than an end unto itself. When viewed from this perspective, the question becomes not “How can we make everyone’s data secure?” but rather, “How does this policy facilitate the secure transfer and storage of information so that we ultimately create a better society?” I think this is one of the best values in Pendland’s work, helping us to ask the right questions that identify the purpose of any information policy. If policies regarding the pitfalls and opportunities of data sharing techniques don’t somehow focus on the larger questions of bringing value to our social exchanges, we have constructed them too narrowly, and at best this represents a missed opportunity.