” and excerpted below.
“Change,” which uses cases studies like this to illustrate what drives behavior change, was published in January by Little, Brown Spark. The excerpt is reprinted with permission.
A few years ago, I received a phone call from the director of performance research and development at the Philadelphia 76ers. He had seen some of my research on social networks and wondered whether my work might be helpful for the NBA.
The problem, he explained, was scouting.
If you’ve read “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis (or seen the film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill), you’ll immediately understand the challenge: Professional sports scouting has long been an old boys’ club. Most professional scouts are former players or managers. They have well-established biases regarding how to evaluate players. Longstanding norms in scouting can privilege certain kinds of players (who tend to fail) and ignore other kinds of players (who may succeed).
Social media is great for acknowledging birthdays, sharing family photos and swapping jokes with friends. But it’s also become fertile ground for temper tantrums.
Cranbrook Public Library
The Cranbrook Public Library is now open with extended hours (with some restrictions and reduced services.) We encourage patrons to limit their visits to 60 minutes. We also have a maximum number of patrons allowed in the building at one time, so you may be asked to wait.
Please wear a mask during your visit. Masks are mandatory now (and must be worn in accordance with provincial guidelines for your entire visit).
Library hours for February are:
10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, Thursday, and Friday
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday
12 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
Imagine you gave the exact same art pieces to two different groups of people and asked them to curate an art show. Later, imagine your surprise when the two art shows are nearly identical. How did these groups organize in the same way without communication? The dominant hypothesis is that people are born with categories already in their brains, but a new study has discovered a novel explanation.
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Imagine you gave the exact same art pieces to two different groups of people and asked them to curate an art show. The art is radical and new. The groups never speak with one another, and they organize and plan all the installations independently. On opening night, imagine your surprise when the two art shows are nearly identical. How did these groups categorize and organize all the art the same way when they never spoke with one another?
The dominant hypothesis is that people are born with categories already in their brains, but a study from the Network Dynamics Group (NDG) at the Annenberg School for Communication has discovered a novel explanation. In an experiment in which people were asked to categorize unfamiliar shapes, individuals and small groups created many different unique categorization systems while large groups created systems nearly identical to one another.