OUR HERD CHANGES US
Growing up, one of the most commonly regurgitated pieces of wisdom I was offered was, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, Sunil.”
Whenever I heard it uttered, I’d always be envious of African or Chinese proverbs that I had come across:
Rain beats the leopard's skin but it does not wash out the spots.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
Rich in imagination and often connected to nature, they always seemed suggestive of a deep wellspring of cultural wisdom stretching back through the ages.
Instead, the little careerist in me was nurtured. Hard work matters, but prosperity would come through connections.
But the worst thing about the saying wasn’t its banality. No, it was that the truth contained within it caused me to miss something about networks that is far more profound.
Networks aren’t just an external force that can propel us to success.
They shape who we are, influencing our beliefs, political opinions and how we perceive the world around us.
Most of us underestimate how our networks shape our lives, while others are completely unaware.
And, as more doubt is cast on some of the theories that identify social media and online echo chambers as the culprits responsible for fissures in our politics, exploring the shaping power of our physical networks might actually be the key to explaining some of the divides that exist in our society.
Today, many of us in the UK live within networks that are marked by homogeneity, whether that be economically, politically or socially.
This matters because homogeneous networks help to fuel a binary political discourse that can leave us confounded by the beliefs of others. This discourse also blinds us to the complexity of many of the generational crises that we face.
Overcoming the power of network effects at an individual level is hard, but Covid-19 has the potential to accelerate trends that might change how networks are formed here in the UK.
In this post, I’ll explore:
Some of the ways in which networks are formed drawing on my experience of going to university;
How networks can shape your perspective with a focus on Covid-19, racism and meritocracy;
Ways in which you can transcend network effects.
Mimetic Contagion
Like many, I’ve recently left London and temporarily moved back to Loughborough, the place I grew up. Every time I return home, I’m reminded of the echo chamber that I normally live in when I’m in London.
There is greater diversity of opinion in my own family on political and social issues than there is amongst my network of friends I spend most of my time with in London.
I have no friends that I know of in London who voted for Brexit, while over 50% of voters in Loughborough and some members of my own family voted for Brexit.
It reminds me of Scott Alexander's piece, I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. Writing about creationism, which 46% of Americans believe in, he ponders:
That’s half the country. And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist.
How do we end up with such intense political segregation?
It might be attributable to a combination of two phenomena that we all experience throughout our lives.
This first is known as homophily, the tendency that we have to seek out people who are similar to ourselves. This isn’t necessarily something that we deliberately set out to do. As I’ll explore, many of us live in environments that are segregated by class and ethnicity.
To understand the second phenomenon, let’s do a little thought experiment.
Imagine you are at a bar (pre or post-pandemic...) with a group of people that you don’t know that well.
They all loudly agree that The Godfather is the best movie series ever made. Even though you disagree - you can’t believe anyone would overlook The Lord of the Rings - you vocally agree with them, for fear of being perceived as a social outcast (read: loser).
It’s a silly example, but that’s social influence at work.
This is where we change our behaviour to meet the demands of a social environment. Repeat enough times and behaviour can transform into belief. We become more similar to those we have ties with.
Social influence is a powerful force. We are natural-born imitators, even more so when it comes to problems that are greater in complexity than deciding the best movie series ever made.
The Sorting Hat
I suspect that my education, especially university, unleashed both of these processes in my life. Although I’ve only realised how much so with the benefit of hindsight.
This is something that David Goodhart explores in his book, The Road to Somewhere. He makes the case that the expansion of higher education has created a whole generation of young graduates whose worldviews are likely to be very different from what they would have been if they stayed at home.
Looking at data from past elections, he finds that more than 50% of BNP voters and 43% of UKIP voters lived within fifteen minutes of their mothers. In contrast, those least likely to live close to their mothers are Green voters, on 25%, and Liberal Democrats, on 30%.
Nationalist voters live closer to home. What’s going on? According to Goodhart:
BNP and UKIP voters are less likely to have been to university.
Green and Liberal Democrats are more likely to have been to university.
And going to university usually means you leave home (of the 19% that live more than 100 miles from where they lived aged fourteen, he finds that the vast majority are graduates).
But why might going to university change your politics?
Goodhart argues that going to university makes the individual “more open to change, less connected to particular places.” His analysis is supported by a study that took place in 2008.
Researchers in the US surveyed 753 members (222 of whom were freshmen) of a residential fellowship programme at 14 large universities. They collected data in two waves - at the start of the academic year and once again after the election in November 2008.
What they asked about: in the second wave, they substituted “Preference for President” and “Likelihood of voting” for actual voting behaviour, as well as surveying four additional data points.
They focused particularly on the 222 freshmen because they hadn’t met each other before, meaning it would be easier to see if their political attitudes had changed to become more like their fellow students.
They found that participants had changed where they placed themselves on the left/right political spectrum, their voting behaviour and even their choice for president. Crucially, they were able to see that individuals did not choose their friends on the basis of their political views. This led them to conclude that, "friendship is the dominant conduit for influence on political attitudes and behaviors."
This resonates with my own experiences. Leaving Loughborough meant I left behind networks that were based on where I grew up. In their place, new networks formed. Networks based on friendship and a shared experience of university that slowly - almost unbeknownst to me - instilled similar beliefs and values.
I can tell I’ve changed because I have close friends (as well as my aforementioned family) who have stayed closer to home, whose views are now different to mine.
But so what? Why does it matter if our networks are full of people who are similar to us?
Know nobody, no problems
Take a look at these three questions:
Are the costs of locking down in response to Covid-19 too high?
Is the UK institutionally racist?
Is success a result of hard work?
What’s your perspective? How did you decide? You made up your own mind, right?
Well actually, your choice of perspective was likely more constrained than you realised because of your networks.
Let me elaborate by looking at each question in turn.
Are the costs of locking down in response to Covid-19 too high?
Consider the correlation between poverty and high Covid-19 mortality rates.
This correlation led Richard Horton, editor of the renowned medical journal, The Lancet, to declare declare that we are actually in the midst of a "syndemic" rather than just a pandemic, where Covid-19 is clustering "within social groups according to patterns of inequality deeply embedded in our societies."
Imagine twenty-two of your neighbours dying.
That’s exactly what happened to Islam who lives in Newham, one of the UK’s most deprived areas, which early on in the pandemic recorded the highest Covid-19 mortality rates.
In Newham, the combination of a high proportion of households with different generations living under the same roof, a population with pre-existing health conditions, and low-paid jobs with a higher risk of exposure created almost perfect conditions for Covid-19 to spread unchecked.
These conditions are not unique to Newham: they’re found in pockets across the UK.
Data from Public Health England show that mortality rates in the most deprived areas were double those in the wealthiest areas during the first lockdown.
Although it hasn’t been definitively proved, emerging data suggests your socio-economic background likely plays a bigger role in whether you catch Covid-19 and how you subsequently fare than almost every other factor other than age.
If you are from a higher socio-economic background, have a low risk and are able to safely distance, your social network will likely mirror these characteristics. That means that your dominant experience - which is heavily influenced by your networks - will likely focus more on the restrictions applied as part of the public health response rather than on the virus itself.
In such a scenario, you may be more likely to emphasise the economic costs of the lockdowns or the loss of freedoms rather than a continued need for strong public health measures.
Is the UK institutionally racist?
During the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this year, I heard individuals express that they hadn’t realised or didn’t think racism was as live an issue as it was being made out to be.
For many people, I’m sure it felt like an abstract issue because they don’t know anyone personally affected by racism. After all, YouGov research in 2018 found that one-third of white Britons don't have any friends from an ethnic minority background.
This isn't about making value judgements.
But if you have few friends personally impacted by an issue like racism you're more likely to fall prey to availability bias. This is where you use examples that come readily to your mind and think that they are more representative than is actually the case.
And in the absence of any connection to an issue, you might even be inclined to downplay the seriousness or existence of an issue.
The reverse can also be true. If you exist in a network where experiences of racism are endemic, you might think that your experiences are happening everywhere, all of the time.
As Morgan Housel notes, "Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. We’re all biased to our own personal history."
But it isn't just about a lack of understanding about how unfolding social problems are impacting others, it's also about ourselves.
Is success a result of hard work?
The homogeneity of our networks can mean we lack self-awareness.
Take the idea of meritocracy, where individuals advance based on their ability and talent rather than class privilege or wealth. Beliefs in meritocracy permeate across the different socio-economic groupings that exist in the UK.
But who believes in meritocracy the most?
In a study by The Sutton Trust where households in different income brackets were asked what they thought was most important for career success, higher-earning respondents all identified meritocratic items like "hard work" as more important than "social class / background." In contrast, lower earning respondents scored "social class / background" much higher than their wealthier counterparts.
When you are doing well it’s easy to deliberately overlook or forget the advantages that have helped propel you to where you are.
One hundred games of Monopoly that took place at the University of California-Berkeley underline this point.
In this study, the games were rigged so that one person in each pair who played got twice as much money to start with, twice as much go money and got to roll both dice instead of one. When asked why they had inevitably won, the richer players didn’t highlight the privileges that they were randomly given in the first place. Instead they talked about what they’d done to earn success in the game.
Perspectives informed by an individual’s socio-economic class can also interlock with geography, especially in London. The Sutton Trust’s research goes on to contend:
Precisely because elite geography is so concentrated on London, those within its environs may not see themselves as especially fortunate... since they are surrounded by numerous other people like themselves.
The researchers found that 44.2% of households with an after tax income of more than £200k, 33% of those in £100-149k band, and 35.9% of those in the £99-150k band all live in London.
If we do live in networks that are marked by homogeneity, in terms of their economic, social and political outlook, little wonder then that we are often perplexed by the beliefs of our compatriots - a feeling which has tended to manifest most dramatically in recent elections and referendums.
Overcoming the Network Effect
Maybe none of the above examples reflected how you came to form your own perspective on the issue at stake, but there are other ways to test the shaping power of your networks on your thinking.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and Palantir, is known for asking people he interviews the following question:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
It’s a difficult question to answer, so take a moment to think about your own response. Most people I’ve asked struggle to come up with an answer that their friends would disagree with.
In other words, most of us hold conventional opinions that our networks would approve of (and have likely played a role in shaping). This is a generalisation, but it’s one that I’ve found to be broadly applicable.
At a societal level, network effects matter because left unchecked, they can contribute to a situation where it becomes harder to forge compromise and solutions to many of our social ills.
As the pandemic has shown, we may live in the same country, but our lives can seem alien to one another. Our individual beliefs and political opinions, so heavily conditioned by our networks risk leading us to a place where one “truth” is pitted against another.
This process happens almost by stealth. You might not even actually spend that much time talking about politics with your friends, but they shape your outlook.
For these reasons, thinking about how your networks shape you is a valuable investment of your time.
But even if you do, can you transcend network effects?
It’s hard.
At an individual level, we can be more deliberate in seeking out those with experiences and perspectives different to our own. Initiatives that facilitate this like Make America Dinner Again and Hi From The Other Side have sprung up and been replicated elsewhere.
But the effects of such initiatives might only be temporary and while the evidence is far from conclusive, they may actually lead to a backfire effect, whereby your established beliefs don’t change, but actually get stronger.
Another approach is to balance your subjective experiences with knowledge of the bigger picture which you could obtain by looking at data on a particular issue.
Or you can take more drastic action. James Currier, who has written extensively about networks, identifies seven crossroads that offer you the chance to change who you are surrounded by, with the amongst the most significant ones being your choice of job and where you live.
The shift to remote work accelerated by the pandemic means that the choice of where you live and work may become more fluid than ever before.
But if the pandemic is a preview of these trends, it seems likely that individuals who are already economically well-off and socially mobile will be the ones who are most able to take advantage of remote working.
Our socially distanced today may foreshadow a structurally distanced tomorrow, with networks becoming increasingly segregated on the basis of economics, politics or even their social outlook.
There is no neat answer to how you can address the network effect. We have some individual agency, but we are also at the mercy of forces outside of our control. This is perhaps best summarised by the authors of the US survey of students who wrote:
We are at once creators and captives of our social networks.
Perhaps the best thing we can do is to cultivate greater awareness of network effects at a younger age. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with a (fictitious) saying that I wish my elders shared with me:
Remember the herd you walk with atop the savannah will change you.
With thanks to Richard, Kush, Shirin, Max, Tom W, Tom D and my Mum who all provided comments on this piece.