From ‘me’ to ‘we’

21st Jul 2009; 13:00

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Mark Earls discusses the emergence of the "social revolution" in marketing management and social policy.

Far from being the independent, self-determining rational agent that our Anglo Saxon culture (and our minds) tell us we are, it turns out that humans are much more of a "we"-creature than we'd like to think and that we do what we do largely because of the influence of other people.

This insight not only explains much of what we see around us - from the clothes we wear and where we live, to the rise of things like Twitter & Facebook, to the waves of collective grief prompted by Michael Jackson's death - but it also suggests a very different approach to our attempts to change other people's behaviour, be it in business or in the public sector.

Speaker: Mark Earls is an RSA Fellow and steering group member for the RSA Social Brain Project. He is the author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature (John Wiley, updated paperback, July 2009).

Chair: Matt Grist, director, Social Brain Project, RSA

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsaearls

Related RSA projects

Find out more about the Social Brain project