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Homo Narrativus and the Trouble with Fame
How Fame Alters Our Perceptions
- 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.
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Key Ideas
Homo Narrativus
We, humans, seek stories.
We are essentially ‘story finders’ looking for meaning, narrative and shape in everything around us. We tend to not believe in improbable stories and tend to create story threads out of thin air, making them real and believable.
Bias Towards The Individual
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.
How Fame Alters Our Perceptions
- 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.
Survivorship Bias
It is the tendency to focus on successful narratives of influential leaders, who offer promising insights backed with credibility.
These people become ‘Opinion Leaders’ due to the fact that society focuses on individuals and loves to hear a narrative, and these people offer both.
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Network Effects
Network effects are the unseen forces that are guiding our destiny and exerting a powerful intervention on our lives, creating energy that escorts us down a path that is not always fully our intent...
Zipf's Law
Zipf's law is a mathematical probability that states that in a given set, the most frequently used data value (or word) is used twice as often as the next most common value. This is true in various statistical sets like income distribution in companies, internet traffic, phone calls received, and language.
One of the implications of this law is there are unconscious network forces and mathematical patterns governing our lives, with human beings just being nodes exchanging information.
Dinner Party Mathematics
When six to eight people are conversing at a dinner party, it is easy to focus on one conversation, but if the number is higher (say 15), then two-way conversations are more likely.
When groups get larger, the change is exponential, not linear, affecting one's social experience.
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Describing wonder
Wonder is said to be a childish emotion. However, as adults, we experience it when gaping at something unexpectedly spectacular.
Adam Smith, an 18th-century moral philosopher, describes wond...
Bodily symptoms
The bodily symptoms of this strange appearance point to three dimensions:
- Sensory: The marvelous things take hold of our senses - we stare and widen our eyes.
- Cognitive: We are perplexed because we don't have a past experience to understand them. It leads to a suspension of breath, similar to when we are startled.
- Spiritual: We look upwards in veneration, which makes our heart swell.
The scale of wonder
At the mild end of this emotion, we talk about things being marvelous. More intense emotions might be described as astonishing. The extreme of this experiences is met with expressions of awe.
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A network is more than just a group of individuals
In addition, a network has ties between people.
The connections between individuals are what changes a group to a network.
Social networks have a strong effect on our ideas
You may think it was your idea to keep your desk neat or speak up in a meeting, but your behavior was likely influenced by those in your network.
Once we understand social networks, we can use its power to shape workplaces for the better. You can turn an unhappy team into an innovative, collaborative one.
We naturally copy others
Your experiences in the world is not only a product of your own desires, actions, and thoughts, but also a product of the desires, actions, and thoughts of people around you.
The things that are seemingly personal to you are actually very strongly influenced by similar traits in other people. You do have agency. You can choose what to do. But you're also affected by what others are doing. Both are true.
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