I gave a talk on the social and educational value of chess in Dallas, Texas recently. The person driving me to the event, John Jacobs, read on the blurb that I worked at the RSA, “a think tank in London”, and asked, in a melodious southern drawl:  “I see that you work in a think tank. So what do you think about?”

I gave the quick elevator pitch for our project(social networks are a tool than can be visualised and used to assist in community regeneration), but the real answer is that we don’t just think, but also research and advocate. In fact the core tension in any think tank is between the rigour of your research and the relevance of your findings. You are obliged to pay allegiance to Truth, Validity, Reliability etc, but while you want the blessings of such celestial Gods, the success of your projects are typically judged by their impact on the terrestial Gods of Media, Funders and Whitehall. (And at the RSA we also want the participants in the research, the people ‘on the ground’ to endorse what we do).

This context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of  a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities Team showed Mathew a few emerging findings, subject to some important qualifications, and he told us which of the ‘findings’ had traction, and which ones needed more work.

When you spend weeks collecting data and trying to make sense of it(especially social network analysis data), you realise that your ‘findings’ are actually constructed on a host of more or less problematic assumptions that are part of the choice architecture of any research project . But when you want to make a splash, and tell the world that you have a new model of social change,  there is an understandable tendency to gloss over such details and focus on the strength of the core message, even if the strong core message is based on tentative foundations.

You only realise how messy social research is when you start trying to do some, and although you may want ‘evidence’, what you tend to get is concepts that are contested, samples that are more indicative than representative,  methods that may or may not be replicable, correlations that may or may not be causal, and ‘findings’ that were created by looking in a particular way for a particular purpose.  As any honest researcher will tell you, respecting such tensions is crucial if the research is going to be informative, or provide the basis for action.

Such rigour is not easy becuase most research is timebound and opportunistic. It is a huge challenge to feel confident that you have tapped into some truth about human nature or the structure of society. For instance, at a recent RSA event, Christakis mentioned that it took 25 years to collect the Farmingham public health data that provided the basis for our interest in social networks, and 5 years and 5 millions dollars to analyse it.

So here is the nub of working at a place like this. If you are passionate about an idea, you can be a vigorous advocate for it, but as part of a project research team, you are asked to be a rigorous advocate. You are asked to push an idea, and, often simultaneously, asked to support it with evidence, even when it is in the nature of evidence to be equivocal and open to interpretation.

The challenge is that robust advocacy is unequivocal and passionate, while reliable research is equivocal and cautious. So is rigorous advocacy an oxymoron?  Or are there ways to feel at ease with the conflicting demands of rigour and relevance?

Yesterday’s RSA Thursday featured Robin Dunbar, Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, but  best known  for having his own number (a sure sign of success), 150, which he argues is the upper limit on the number of people you can maintain stable relationships with.

The idea is powerful, but it’s not new. I first came across it more than a decade ago when it was already called Dunbar’s number (Dunbar’s first major paper on the idea was in 1992), but it was then a much simpler anthropological notion about optimal group sizes, i.e. the upper size that communities and organisations should maintain in order to retain the informal efficiency of mutual recognition, trust and stability, rather than creating cumbersome rules and regulations that we seem to need in society at large.

In this respect,  Dunbar’s new book, How many friends does one person need? can be thought of as Dunbar 2.0, in which the idea has been revitalised as a corrective to the rampant polyphilia on facebook  and other social networking sites. Dunbar 2.0 says loud and clear that you can have thousands of  facebook ‘friends’ if you want, but there are constraints on how many of them can meaningfully be called friends.

There can be no uncontested notion of what ‘friend’ means, but Dunbar argues that humans consistently show a pattern of layering their social contacts, with a core of close friends around 5, 15 considered ‘good friends’, 50 as ‘friends’ and up to 150 as acquaintances. Jacob Morgan’s blog gives a powerful graphic for this idea and the discussion on socialmediatoday.com is well worth reading.

Dunbar’s work is highly complex and interdisciplinary, and his core claim is that there are two constraints on stable relationships. The first is cognitive, the neural density and processing power needed to retain detailed information on people, or ‘keep track’ of them as Dunbar put it yesterday. The second is temporal, the time we need to invest so that people to create mutual interest and regard, and so that such relationships don’t decay, i.e so that  friends don’t become strangers all over again.

There are many things to say about this fascinating idea, but I want to raise one in particular. It might be true that human beings are limited by Dunbar’s number, but much of Dunbar’s work seems to be based on extrapolations on primate behaviour. He thinks in evolutionary terms that are framed principally by biology and anthropology. But I wonder whether he should pay more attention to technological change as part of cultural evolution, for 21st century human beings in the developed world are now suspended somewhere between primates and robots.  Indeed, many, most notably Andy Clark, have argued that human beings should be thought of as cyborgs.

“We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature’s very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind.”

So that would be my challenge for developing a Dunbar 3.0. Our minds and our technologies are increasingly part of continuim, with much of our memory and functionality stored in digital form. A person may only need a certain number of friends, or be capable of maintaining 150, but what of person-plus? What of the fact that we now live and learn and think with machines? What of the Cyborgs that we are becoming? We are so now thoroughly dependent on digital tools, and our sense of self interwoven with them, that it is far from unimaginable that future technologies will overcome the temporal and cognitive constraints intimated by Dunbar’s existing work.

Perhaps we are already doing so, because  it is easier to keep track of people, and it is easier to invest time in relationships than it has ever been.

However,  one of the many big suggestive points made yesterday was that we may need to physically touch people to remain close to them. The importance of touch for bonding is not fully researched yet, but it might be crucial- those handshakes, hugs and cheek-kisses may matter more than you know… and as Dunbar noted, it is hard to imagine ‘virtual touch’…but you never know…

(By Rohan Talbot, RSA Intern for Connected Communities and Social Brain)

Reading through the 2008 Social Capital Survey carried out in Camden, I came across something that piqued my interest. Among the various findings of the survey was the discovery that residents’ perceptions of whether they could influence local decision-making (either individually or collectively), are related to their satisfaction with their local area and quality of life. Higher satisfaction with quality of life was also found among those who thought they had a choice over whether or not they had to live in that local area.

This seems to chime with research in clinical and health psychology demonstrating the importance of personal ‘perceived control’ to human wellbeing. There is a wealth of evidence suggesting that people in stressful circumstances (including physical or mental illness) who believe that they have some control over the situation and their lives generally tend to have better physical and psychological health outcomes.

Sir Michael Marmot, professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL and author of ‘The Status Syndrome: How social standing directly affects our health and longevity’, has pointed out that socioeconomic status is inversely related to health and life expectancy, even when risk factors such as smoking or high cholesterol are controlled for.  Resources such as income and social support give people more choices and therefore more opportunities to change aspects of their lives that they may be dissatisfied with. Understandably, therefore, those with lower socioeconomic status often feel a lack of control over their lives. A lack of perceived control may therefore be not only contributing to the low reported wellbeing and satisfaction in deprived communities, but also to their significantly poorer health. Marmot argues that this link is due to the fact that low status leads to stress, which in turn can directly harm health.

Reviewing research into personal control beliefs, John and Catherine MacArthur also found that perceived control may buffer against some of the negative effects of low socioeconomic status:

“…among those with less education or income, those with strong control beliefs reported health outcomes comparable to those seen in higher SES groups for self-rated health, acute physical symptoms, depressive symptoms and life satisfaction.”

If we wish to improve the community wellbeing, perhaps we should seek to increase the control people feel they have over their lives. The most direct way to do this is to increase the material resources and developing education, income and public services. Nevertheless, in a time when financial belts are being tightened and there are fewer resources available for development, we may have to look at less expensive ways to increase people’s actual and perceived control.

Informing people of what decisions are being made in their local area, and ensuring residents’ voices are heard in decision making (e.g. the Tower Hamlets ‘You Decide!’ initiative to give residents a say in how the local budget is spent), may contribute to perceived control. Enabling people to connect to a wider social network of others with similar interests and concerns, who may be collectively able to influence decision-making, may also help. Perhaps even the process of surveying communities may have a positive impact, so long as those being surveyed believe that their opinions and concerns are being listened to and that the research will address local problems.

Whatever projects giving people more control over their lives and communities are pursued, they can clearly a positive impact beyond people’s engagement with the community and satisfaction with their quality of life. They may help make our communities not only happier, but potentially healthier too.

Last night’s Think Tank Clash at the South Bank Centre, organised by New Deal of The Mind was hopefully the first of many such events. Around 300 people were hosted by comedian Rory Bremner and  the atmosphere was as playful as it was political, with a pint or two enjoyed by many of the audience, and most of the participants. Reviews of the Think Tank Clash format so far have been good, though I am sure if the event is repeated it has scope to be even better.

There were 8 think tanks involved:  Progress, ResPublica, Fabian Society, Reform,  Policy Exchange,  IPPR, Demos,  and of course, The RSA. You might not have thought of the RSA as a ‘think tank’ before, and indeed the organisation as a whole, with our fellowship, House, and Events programme, does not match that description very tightly. One way to square this circle is to think of the RSA Projects team as a think tank within the RSA, albeit one that places less emphasis on producing pamphlets and informing policy, and more on practical impact in the real world.

Each think tank had two representatives, the head honcho and their ‘witness’. I was Mathew Tayor’s witness, and I think the role of the witnesses more generally was to signal that the organisations involved are more than just their most public face and voice, an association perpetuated by the media reflex to seek comment from prominent and familiar faces.

We were pitched against Demos, represented by their Director Richard Reeves, and Stephen Scott, who looked a little bit like Kramer from Seinfeld.  There was no Oxford Union style ‘motion’ to debate, but we were charged with convincing the audience that in the realm of big ideas, our work on social networks, particularly their role in community regeneration, was more important/pertinent/illuminating than  Demos’s work on Character .

Needless to say, the debate involves a bit of a false binary, and is more about means than ends, because it makes little sense to be against character or networks. Demos argue that good societies need good people, which is a powerful point, and their claim that character is largely shaped by good parenting is carefully argued and empirically grounded. More specutively, they suggest that government should take a more proactive role in encouraging good parenting.

Our response is that networks are character forming, and that who your parents are and how they are is largely based on the nature of their social network. Moreover, character may be an important personal quality, but social networks can be thought of as a public good- a shared resource that nobody owns but that everybody can potentially benefit from.  In short, our idea is more progressive.

The vote was close, but we won for two main reasons: 1) I emphasised that our research was grounded in fieldwork on the ground, and that we were literally ‘knocking on doors’ to make sense of the power of social networks in deprived communities, and 2) Mathew Taylor looked like “the sexy bad guy in a James Bond movie”

The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.

As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).

The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.

So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).

Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.

The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated.  Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.

I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:

If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant  CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.

How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.

The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)

The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.

Yesterday evening we were fortunate to have Jaron Lanier, described by the New York Times as “one of the digital pioneers” in the internet age, come to give a talk at the RSA about his new book, ‘You Are Not a Gadget.’  In this book Jaron develops a more cautious tone to his previously optimistic take on the power of the internet to decentralise cultural production and empower a more diverse and diffuse cultural sphere.

Instead, he argues that a more pernicious by-product of the mantras of ‘open culture’ and ‘information wants to be free’ is coming to dominate.  This by-product is a destructive new social contract whereby, as he writes, “authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.  Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion.  Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

This raises an interesting point for us in Connected Communities, for it suggests that this ’social contract’ might be re-spun in a more positive light, whereby culture becomes precisely nothing but altruism.  This possibility is deflated, however, when we consider what John Tierney, in the New York Times, describes as a “crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.”  The problem, then, isn’t so much the giving, but rather the disequilibrium that has emerged between those who provide and those who retrieve online content.

It is in part in response to this disequilibrium that Jaron proposes an overhaul of the ideological underpinnings of the Web, comprising a revision of its software structure and, notably, the introduction of a universal system of micropayments (among other innovations).  The suggestion is that even in the online world where the scope for a global economy of regard is huge – in so far as transaction costs can be minimised and information shared with incredible ease – penalties, controls and prices need to be introduced to ensure that this vast potential is not abused.

This seems, in sum, to be a call for a more healthy form of reciprocity, whereby payment is not so much seen as antithetical to reciprocal relations – as Tim Harford put it recently “many policy wonks believe …that cash incentives are counterproductive and even morally corrosive” – but rather, where needed, as a formalisation of the very process of reciprocation.

Back on the ground, in traditional, place-based communities, the implications of this are as yet unclear.  However, as we start at Connected Communities to try to lubricate the exchange of individuals’ and groups’ social capital, assets and resources, it does raise the question not only of how we should expect communities to cope with unequal flows of time, knowledge and resources (time banks may be one possibility), but also of how any regulatory framework that we develop around this accounts for the differentiated stocks of social capital (and so individuals’ capacity to share) that already exist.

Bill Gates has scattered quite a few nuggets of remunerative star dust over the years, but one quotation should be more widely known:

“The first rule of any technology used… is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Wonferful!

But is it true?

Discerning readers may have guessed that the dot dot dot above replaced ‘in business’, but Gates’s point might apply to the labour market. How efficient are the mechanisms that connect labour supply to labour demand? If there are generally inefficient, will using technology merely compound matters, or are we missing important tricks that might radically increase Britain’s porductivity?

These thoughts amount to a quick cyber shout to anybody watching about tomorrow’s RSA Thursday Lunchtime event:

How can we use online markets more effectively to ensure we create value and opportunity for the low-paid and unemployed?

The Speakers are Wingham Rowan, project director at Slivers of Time Working; Jerry Fishenden, founder of the Centre for Technology Policy Research and there will be a “contribution” (presumably verbal) by Rt Hon James Purnell MP. The event will be chaired by Mathew Taylor.

The blurb from the RSA events team is below:

E-marketplaces have developed exponentially in the last 15 years, and financial institutions now turbo-trade billions worth of assets every day. But the benefits of these new marketplaces are primarily concentrated at the top levels of the economy, and have neglected the resources that people at the bottom of the economic pyramid could sell. A new generation of marketplace could utilise the time, potential and skills of the less well-off or unemployed – simultaneously creating value for the individuals concerned, and flooding the market with hitherto untapped products and services.

Creating ‘modern markets for all’ should now be a priority, but the private sector can’t work alone to create the marketplaces needed. Is it time for policymakers to make modern, inclusive marketplaces a priority across multiple sectors at the bottom of the economy?

I read with interest Rob Bagchi’s prediction – and let’s face it, as a sports journalist he’s pretty familiar with predictions – that the closing down of the British Library’s newspaper depository in Colindale in 2012 may signal the demise of the UK’s statistics-enamoured sports fan community.  As he put it at the end of his revealing mini-ethnography of this particular grouping of, it seems predominantly if not entirely entirely, men:

When Colindale closes in 2012 I fear that another refuge for the trivia-enchanted sports fan will not take its place, somewhere that you could always wear your metaphorical anorak with pride.  The internet provides things we could never have envisaged but the library’s sense of community may be lost forever.

What struck me about this closing comment was that while the internet has been touted as an overwhelmingly empowering medium, through which we can build anew a lively and inclusive public sphere, in this instance the digitisation of information may result in the disbanding of an, albeit fragile, active and engaged community.  What also struck me was the significant role played by Rob’s sensually-experienced descriptions of the library’s visitors – e.g. ‘the man who reeked of Dettol’ or ‘the hare-eyed chap with the roll-up permanently wedged behind his ear’ – in illuminating the milieu to which he referred.

If we take such physical co-presence and the immediate (as opposed to mediated) experience of difference as an important part of a healthy, democratic society (esp. see the work of Iris Marion Young on ‘the politics of difference’), then the implications of such displacement of face-to-face communities by wired ones may be serious.

In particular, I would argue that a particular question is raised by these implications, namely how might we actively re-shape the potential posed by ever-increasing digital connectivity to take mutual social activity out of place into a reinvigoration of embodied public life that draws on the internet’s potential to draw people together around interests, concerns, ideas etc?

Thankfully, there are already some unmissable indications that the digital revolution doesn’t have to sign the end of communities of co-presence, but rather can generate communities of this kind that were unimaginable previously.  I am thinking of flash mobs specifically here and the numerous transformative appropriations of space and time that this situationist ‘movement’ has achieved.  Notably, flash mob happenings have been able to bring together previously unknown others to act collectively to an unprecedented degree.  Rather than lament the envisaged dissipation of the Colindale sports fan community, then, can we be more hopeful that the digitisation of sports statistics may provide a shared resource around which a wider community may develop?  Does the transfer of information into bits and bytes necessarily mean that we’ll no longer come together to share in its exploration and analysis, or does it just mean that we might have to be more actively engaged in ensuring that this information is shared, pored over and put to use in ways that still physically bring people together?

How much power do you have?

If you are struggling to answer that question, defining power and creating a suitable metric would be a good place to start. Neither task is easy, but Demos recently attempted both,  resulting in: The Power Gap: An Index of Everyday Inequality in Britain, written by Daniel Leighton.

According to Demos, what makes a person powerful is a combination of three factors: the ability to shape one’s own life, to be resilient in the face of shocks and the arbitrary power of others, and the power to shape the social world. These three factors are measured in terms of eight power indicators: Education, occupational status, income, employment, freedom from crime, health, voter turnout, marginality of parliamentary seat.

The theoretical framing of power seems quite sophisticated, but the research, as far as I understand it, amounted to a large scale quantitative data survey, with several proxies used for the relevant measures. For instance, an individual’s measure of ‘personal power’ is a mixture of their level of academic qualifcations as a proxy for their critical thinking and choice of occupation, their income is a proxy for control over personal decisions, and their seniority as a proxy for control in the workplace.

Demos are of course aware that such measures are approximations, and if your ambition is to map levels of something as intangible as ‘personal control’ over the whole country, it is hard to see how you could do much better. For several thousand individuals the data and the proxies will not adequately capture their power level, subjectively or objectively(whatever that means in this context) but in aggregate the data does seem meaningful and powerful. The map may not be the territory, but it’s a pretty impressive map nonetheless.

I found it a fascinating report to read, not least becasue The Connected Communities Project is based on a less formalised understanding of the inequality of ‘power’, and driven by attempts to foster empowerment through building social capital in deprived communities. When he was recently speaking at the RSA, John Kamphner said he didn’t like the word ‘empowerment’ because it sounded too ‘NGOish’, but it is not easy to find a suitable replacement. The question of giving individuals and communities more control over their lives and their environments is very much the heart of the connected communities project, and the Demos report, and I think ‘empowerment’ captures that idea quite well, NGOish or not. (Demos also use ‘resilience’ as a key component of power i.e. the ability to withstand shocks and arbitrary changes. Their proxies for resilience are health, crime and unemployment, while our main claim is that resilience is a function of the range and density of social networks).

Inequality comes in many guises, but the Demos report contends that the inequality that impacts on life quality most tangibly is the inequality of power. At first blush, inequality of power sounds like a tautology, because we are used to thinking of power in hierarchical or ‘power over’ terms, whereby power is a zero sum game, traded between boss and worker, state and citizen etc. But the power at stake in this report is principally the power to shape one’s own life i.e “The power of the effective agent to make things happen.”, as they put it in the report, or as Bertrand Russell put it even more succinctly, “The production of intended effects”.

The report is heavily informed by Amartya Sen’s work on Capabilities, who refers to the central importance of people having “The opportunity to lead lives they have reason to value”.

I refer you to the report for more detailed considerations about the relative power of different areas in the uk, but what I didn’t find there, and what I would like to have known, is how a map of the inequality of power differs from a map on the inequality of income; such a comparison would have been illuminating.

In terms of closing gap between the powerful and powerless, I think we need a deeper understanding of surplus powerlessness, an idea of Michael Lerner’s that was highlighted in the report: “Surplus powerlessness refers to the fact that human beings contribute to their existing powerlessness to the extent that their emotional, intellectual and spiritual makeup prevents them from actualising possibilities that do exist.” Lehrer is clear that such surplus powerlessness is a direct cause of real powerlessness i.e. that the inequality of power in socio-economic terms creates a vicious circle and becomes compounded by our psycho-social makeup. On this analysis, the inequality of power literally goes from bad to worse.

On a more optimistic note, at the RSA we believe that becoming empowered is about recognising that our autonomy increases as we recognise our interdependence. While we encourage policy makers to address the inequality of power at whatever levels policy can have impact (education, employment, health, law and order etc) we can begin to address surplus powerlessness by a deeper appreciation of our connectivity, and by accessing sources of power through available networks.  Hannah Arendt puts the point more powerfully:

“Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’, we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain group of people to act in their name.”

My name is Rohan Talbot, the new intern with the Connected Communities and Social Brain projects. One of my first duties is to write something on the relationship between these two projects, so here goes.

If a person wishes to fix a broken car, they must understand its internal components, how they function, and how these functions relate to other components. If the problem lies in a small part of the engine, then attempting to fix the car as a whole entity would be fruitless. Similarly, if we wish to solve societal problems, it is important to understand the behaviour of individuals since it plays such an important part in shaping the effectiveness of the community as a whole.

Of course, underpinning any model of social interaction are assumptions regarding human motivations and behaviour, but these models have typically assumed that humans act in a way that is referred to as ‘rational’; i.e. that individuals are self-interested and seeking to maximise personal gains. Such models of human behaviour therefore give relatively few opportunities for pro-social action (either from individuals or whole groups) compared to other approaches, since they expect that people are unlikely to expend resources and engage in behaviours that do not directly benefit themselves. We therefore need a fuller appreciation for our social nature, to help us understand how we can be motivated to act in ways that benefit our communities without the provision of direct (and perhaps economic) incentives.

With surprising regularity, we come across instances of individuals who risk their well-being or reduce their own resources in order to help others. Examples range from grand personal gestures (such as Warren Buffett’s pledge to donate billions of dollars to the Gates Foundation) to the many people who engage in voluntary work. These seemingly ‘altruistic’ acts pose a significant problem for traditional rational-choice models of human behaviour, since such actions would not occur if human beings were self interested resource-maximisers. Notably some evidence is starting to suggest, as we have long suspected, that individuals are greatly influenced by their social cognition. Factors like social identity, empathy and social perception can therefore be important influences on people’s behaviour.

So the reasons for seemingly altruistic behaviour are becoming clearer. We may engage in such behaviour for intangible social rewards of ‘positive regard’ or increased status. Others suggest that altruism may be based on the person’s desire to view themselves as a ‘good person’, rather than empathic concern for the well-being of others. The view that the RSA seems to espouse, based on evidence from evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics, is that we are reciprocal altruists. The ‘reciprocal altruism’ argument suggests that people may engage in behaviour that incurs a personal cost because they expect that, if they were to also find themselves in a position of need, they would receive similar help or cooperation from others in their group. The strength of reciprocal altruism is, however, limited by the number of people who consistently prioritise their own needs above collaboration. If just 5% of a population act as ‘egoists’, it can reduce overall cooperation among the population by about 40%.

Such is the strength of the norm of reciprocity that, when a favour is enacted (whether asked for or not), we will be more willing to comply with requests from the giver; even when it opposes our own, ‘rational’ interests. A common example can be seen when charities include a small ‘gift’ (such as a pen or personalised address labels) with their direct mailing. By giving us this token, they are engaging with the reciprocity norm, in an attempt to induce ‘altruistic’ behaviour in the form of donations. It is a tactic that works surprisingly well.

All of these approaches share an appreciation for the fact that we are essentially social creatures. There are already examples where such an understanding has been put into practice. In 2005 Camden Council initiated their ‘Exceptional People in Camden’ awards (repeated in 2006 and 2008) for people who have made a notable contribution to local life through their voluntary and community-focussed work. By recognising and publicising community-focused action, such programmes can help to reinforce community norms which value ‘altruistic’ behaviour and the people who engage in it. Furthermore, initiatives such as time banks, which allow individuals to reciprocally exchange services rather than money, have been introduced in some areas. Such schemes can be relatively cheap to set up, and may help to promote and formalise community norms of trust and reciprocity, thereby building social capital by helping to extend and strengthen social networks.

 Our decision-making processes clearly go beyond simple economic cost-benefit analyses. Instead, they include a strong concern for our place in society and our relations with other individuals. Understanding the ‘Social Brain’ is therefore important to the Connected Communities project, as knowing how to motivate the ‘engine parts’ of communities (i.e. individual members) to act in a pro-social way can help us to keep our communities running smoothly.