The hipster effect

• The bandwagon effect can influence people’s political choices.
• It can influence consumers’ decisions regarding which products to buy.
• It can influence users’ decisions regarding how to rate stories or comments.
• It can influence investors’ financial choices.
• It can influence doctors’ medical decisions.
• It can influence organizations’ implementation of new technologies.

It serves as a mental shortcut that people instinctively use in order to make a decision quickly.

Specifically, bandwagon cues, which are signs that other people believe something or are doing something, can trigger the thought that “if other people like this, then I should too”.

People having a high level of self-control experience better relationships and have higher achievement levels. Lack of self-control is associated with social conflict and low-grade academic performance.

Example: While following a diet regime, a person spends a lot of willpower the whole day trying to avoid junk food, but by the end of the day, all his mental energy has been exhausted, and there is no self-control left, resulting in snacking on unhealthy food.

Many emotional and physical factors contribute to ego depletion, like:

• Emotional distress
• Struggling to learn something new
• Mental fatigue due to anxiety
• Low levels of blood sugar
• Too much choice
• Conflicting beliefs and actions (cognitive dissonance)
• Heart Rate
• Hormonal imbalance
• Being young and immature.

• One common explanation: we that if everyone else is choosing to do one thing, it is probably a good thing to do.
• Another common explanation: we fear that failing to follow a norm may have negative social consequences.

The idea of the self-categorization theory is that people conform to the norms of certain social groups whenever they have a personal desire to feel like they belong.

It is irrelevant whether a norm reflects people's preference, as long as the behavior is associated with the group.

These models represent collections of individual people described by computer algorithms that capture a specific set of traits, such as a tendency to cooperate or not.

• You can give them new personalities to see how they would behave.
• You can observe social processes in action.
• You can observe time scales, from seconds to generations.
• You can watch the spread of certain behaviors throughout a population and you can see how certain behaviors influence other behaviors.

The patterns that emerge can tell you things about large-scale social interaction that lab experiments and real people never could.

There seems to be evolutionary logic to the human ability to cooperate but adjust if necessary. To trust, but verify. 

We generally collaborate with other people because it benefits us. Our rational minds let us work out when we might occasionally gain by acting selfishly instead.

• For marketers: Drawing out a decision based on feelings could encourage a stronger allegiance among consumers. This could be achieved through subtle tactics like visuals instead of words, or colors instead of gray-scale.

• For consumers: Choices that need steadfast commitment should be made with emotion instead of weighing up pros and cons. Choices that need frequent consideration should be made rationally.

The Political landscapes across the globe were proving drastically wrong forecasts, with improbably wrong polling data.

The mainstream media, which is relying on social media for most of the data, was misleading because of it, and the political forecasters were not listening to what needed to be listened to.

By deriving polling data from social media and quoting trending soundbites from Twitter and Facebook, real voices that may not be trending and of any interest to politicians, lobbyists, activists or business interests are losing ground.

The typical explanation is that our brains take shortcuts to save energy:

• Statements presented in as easy-to-read color are judged as more likely to be true.
• Aphorisms that rhyme (like “what sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals") seem more accurate than non-rhyming versions.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. ”

• Animals (especially a "whole animal" approach, including organs, bone marrow, cartilage, and organs).
• Animal products (such as eggs or honey).
• Vegetables and fruits.
• Raw nuts and seeds.
• Added fats (like coconut oil, avocado, butter, ghee).

Stories built around individuals provide relatability and a sense of being in the shoes of the people involved, living in the narrative.

Our tendency to give a ‘face’ and a story to a group or collection of people made us invent a dominant leader of the group, like the President, or the Team Captain, or the Monarch.

• The popularity or fame of an individual or a piece of art (like a painting, song or a movie) alters how we perceive it.
• The characteristics and behaviour of the people among whom fame spreads matters more than the actual merit or quality.
• A study showed that more people liked the songs that were topping the charts, copying the behaviour of other listeners, and if the same songs were arranged randomly, they were not chosen or liked that much.