On the desolate tundra of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, stones lie in hauntingly beautiful, nearly perfect circular piles. Apparently the work of some intelligent, organizing force, the circles actually arise through a completely natural process: repeated freezing and thawing first pushes the stones into elongated piles, and then curves those piles around into rings. The creator is feedback: a little pattern, even if it arises by accident, sets up forces that lead to more.
Human intuition is ill-prepared to understand such spontaneous order, which seems to emerge from nowhere. Suppose you pour thousands of tiny metal or plastic beads into a shallow box, and then start shaking it up and down. Will anything interesting happen? When physicists did this experiment a few years ago, they found a surprise. When the shaking gets fast enough, ridges in beautiful wave-like patterns fill the box, overlapping to form perfect squares and hexagons. Striking pattern emerges all on its own.
What about people and the social world? Are we influenced by the same kind of spontaneous order? We like to think of ourselves as self-determined beings who lead our lives by reason, and act on the basis of our own free will. But is that right?
In June of 2000, on the afternoon of the opening of the London Millenium Bridge, a policemen noticed that the bridge was swaying from side to side, swinging several inches in either direction. Authorities quickly closed the bridge, fearing a collapse. What had happened? The current best explanation is that people's feet, simply by walking, had set up a gentle sway in the bridge. To keep their balance, people found it easier to adjust their gait and walk in time with the sway. This synchronized the walking of hundreds, and amplified the motion. The more the bridge swayed, the more people adjusted their gait, making the bridge sway even more. Feedback and spontaneous order of a rather dangerous kind.
A deeper question: do similar kinds of spontaneous order affect the way we think, the opinions we have, the clothes we wear, our political beliefs and so on? Could our lives be strongly influenced and channeled by patterns of which we're hardly aware?
The social world is complicated, and long tradition among philosophers and social theorists holds that it's hard to fathom because people, as individuals, are hard to fathom. But the examples just mentioned make the point that rich patterns can emerge even in collections of simple things, stones or tiny beads. Logically speaking, then, even if people were simple, the social world might still have lots of complexity in its collective patterns. Within the past few years, social researchers have begun to take this point very seriously. What they're finding is that social phenomena ranging from fashions to fluctuations in financial markets, and from ethnic hatreds to our deepest moral inclinations about kindness and generosity, make better sense when thought of as spontaneous social patterns, akin to those stone circles in Spitzbergen. People are akin to "atoms," in that we are the elementary building blocks of the social world. And understanding that world has more to do with feedback and collective pattern than with the complexity of individual human psychology.
In the early 1970s, it was an economist at Harvard University, Thomas Schelling, who first pointed to the importance of this way of thinking. Most Americans then assumed that persisting racial segregation had an obvious cause – racist attitudes. After all, studies had revealed widespread racial bias in hiring and pay, and real estate practices that kept blacks out of white neighborhoods. But Schelling suggested that another, hidden factor might also be at work – a kind of mechanical sorting process.
In a thought experiment, he supposed that many people, even those who are perfectly happy to live in an integrated neighborhood, might still prefer not to live in one where they were part of an extreme minority. This isn't really racism, and you wouldn't think this simple preference could have much influence, but it can. Moving coins representing people around on a grid of squares representing houses, Schelling showed that the simple preference not to live in an extreme minority will lead people to move about in such a way that the community ends up segregated in racially distinct enclaves.
No one would come to this counterintuitive insight by sitting in an armchair, philosopher-like, and thinking about it. Schelling found it by way of an experiment. The important conclusion is that segregation by itself doesn't imply racism; segregation might well arise quite automatically, the races separating like oil and water. And also that the link between social causes and outcomes is anything but obvious.
What Schelling did with his coins, many other researchers are now pursuing with modern computers – and turning up equally important surprises. For example, why is it that so many people around the world feel convinced that their culture is superior to all others? Such "ethnocentrism" presumably finds its roots in the evolutionary advantage of social cohesion it gave to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, living in small groups under hostile conditions. But the mechanism behind ethnocentrism in modern times may also be linked to less obvious collective pattern.
On the basis of computer simulations, political scientists Ross Hammond of the Brookings Institute and Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan recently suggested that in especially primitive social conditions – when people have limited opportunities to use reputation or individual character as a guide to someone's trustworthiness – raw prejudice, based on crude ethnic markers, can actually be beneficial. Under such conditions, it can help to organize people into homogeneous ethnic groups within which interaction is easy and mostly cooperative, while minimizing the more difficult interactions between groups. The conclusion, paradoxically, is that ethnocentrism, while it may be ugly, also may be effective, and that it may be no coincidence that ethnic divisions and tensions tend to become enhanced in conditions of economic collapse or social decay where managing cooperation is difficult.
Other research now suggests that collective patterns may even lie behind our human instincts for generosity and fairness.
If economists and biologists have long doubted that true human altruism exists, recent experiments have convincingly proved that it does. In one such experiment, an experimenter gives one of two people some cash, say £50, and asks them to offer some of it (any amount they choose) to another person, who can either accept or reject the offer. If the second person accepts, the cash is shared out accordingly; if he or she rejects it, no one gets to keep anything.
If we were all self-interested and greedy, then the second person would always accept the offer, as getting something is clearly better than getting nothing. And the first person, knowing this, would offer as little as possible. But that's not what happens. Experiments across many cultures show that people typically offer anything from 25 to 50 percent of the money, and reject offers less than around 25 percent, "punishing" the person for making an unfair offer.
This really does seem to be pure altruism, and suggests that its not a behavioural anomaly when people give to charity, tip waiters in countries they'll never again visit, or dive into rivers to save other people or even animals. Such behaviour is inherently human. And there's an interesting theory as to why we're like this.
Economists and anthropologists have been exploring how self-interest and cooperation might have played out in our ancestral groups of hunter-gatherers. In interactions between individuals, purely self-interested people would tend to come out ahead, as they'd never get caught out helping others without getting help in return. But it is also likely that when neighboring groups compete with one another, the group with more altruists in it would have an advantage, as it would be better able to manage collective tasks – things like farming and hunting, providing for defense or caring for the sick – than a group of more selfish people.
So you can imagine a basic tension in the ancient world between individual interactions that favor self-interest and personal preservation, and group interactions that favor individual altruism. Detailed simulations, notably by Robert Boyd and colleagues at UCLA, indicate that if the group competition is strong enough, cooperators will persist because of their intense value to group cohesion. It may be a long history of often brutal competition among groups that has turned most of us into willing cooperators; important collective patterns in the remote past have left traces in our natural social emotions.
For centuries the great philosophers and social theorists have played around with fascinating games of "what if." Plato explored what the supposed perfect state would be if it was ruled by wise Philosopher- Kings. More recently we've had spectacular – and often spectacularly painful – musings on the benefits of anything from communism to deregulation. Unfortunately, these musings have always been based around lots of words and vague arguments, because no human mind is smart enough to foresee what really might happen when you make changes in systems involving ten or a hundred or a million people. The growing web of causes and effects just overwhelms the power of even the greatest human mind to foresee what might come out.
But no more – or at least not always. Today, scientists have learned to augment the power of their minds with computing technology able to penetrate those webs. And they're realising that a good way to get some insight into the human world is to step back from our usual fixation on the nuances of individual human psychology, and to follow a more simple-minded approach. We should think of people as if they were atoms or molecules following fairly simple rules, and try to learn the patterns to which those rules lead.
There are law-like patterns in the social world, even though they do not conflict with our free will; we can be free individuals whose actions, in combination, lead to predictable outcomes for the collective.
