Core thematic strands

Core thematic strands of the Social Brain programme

'Human nature' is our broad domain, but Social Brain filters decisions about incoming project ideas in terms of three principle aspects of human nature: Habits, Decisions and Attention.

Habits

  • Most of our acquired behaviour is habitual in that we typically act without consciously thinking about what we are doing.
  • Our individual and collective success and wellbeing depends upon managing or changing bad habits and forming, maintaining and spreading good ones.
  • Meaningful and enduring societal impact occurs when pro-social behaviour becomes habitual within people and contagious between people.
  • Our work in this area is informed by a recent study at UCL suggesting it takes 66 days for a new behaviour to become habitual, and the theoretical underpinnings of our Connected Communities project.

Decisions

  • Billions of decisions are taken every day, many of great consequence.
  • The field of behavioural economics has strongly challenged the assumption of profit-maximising rationality that underpins most economic and social policy.
  • Most decisions do not stem from sanitised logic for personal gain but on the basis of familiar heuristics, the decisions of others, emotional associations and 'doing the right thing'.
  • We seem to care more about the short term than the long term, are more concerned with loss than gain, and evaluate on the basis of relative rather than absolute value. At the same time, we are highly sensitive to cognitive dissonance, and will distort and deny evidence in order to continue to think of ourselves as rational.

Attention

  • Modern technology, for all its innumerable life enhancing benefits, is making new demands on our attention.
  • Baroness Greenfield argued that our reliance on IT may diminish our attention spans, undermining our appreciation of narrative and structured thought.
  • Richard Watson contends that the downside of permanent connectivity is continual distraction.
  • Kenneth Gergen describes the growth of ‘absent presence’, in which people are physically together but mentally apart as a major social challenge.
  • Nicholas Carr suggests Google may be making us stupid, by undermining depth and reflection.
  • A major challenge for society is to learn to keep control of our attention, and be more fully present, aware of what we are doing and who we are with. Our Mindfulness project addresses this concern.

View past Social Brain project reports, Changing the Subject and Steer.