okay good evening so simple selfish and
hungover we’re going to have a little
think about leadership and I’m hopefully
going to provide you with a bit of a
different perspective and perhaps some
new ideas and we’re going to start
that’s me just start with an image from
my research it’s still bit in the corner
that’s me there and that’s a bunch of
sheep which I’m studying and this is in
Australia so much to the surprise and
delight of the local Australians that
Welshman went all the way to Australia
to study sheep one of the reasons I was
there was that I was able to get a
really great data set about these sheep
so I was interested in how they interact
with each other and what we were able to
do was put these backpacks on the sheep
so each of these little blue boxes
contain a GPS and those GPS devices tell
me where the sheep are every second and
how they’re interacting with each other
so I’m going to play you in a moment is
a little movie of the data that we
collected and this is the projection of
that data so these red blobs are the
sheep and this blue blob down here is a
sheepdog which I put the GPS collar on
here as well and so I’ll play it now for
you and you’ll see what happens when the
sheepdog approaches the Sheep and you’ll
see how they interact with each other
and how they respond to the doc
so there we are off she goes and they
all form a really dense flock and then
she sits behind them and starts moving
them down to this bottom corner so these
technologies allow me a really great
insight into what’s going on and they
provide us with data that we’ve never
had before and we can look at how
interact how individuals are interacting
in these places all right so when we
look at these
it’s nice fun to look at from this
aerial view but from my perspective as a
biologist I get to answer two questions
normally I’m interested in why the sheep
are acting like they are so what’s the
point of their behavior and then
secondly how they’re doing it so what
they’re doing to be enable them to
perform these types of behavior so the
why question is pretty similar to many
schools official flocks of birds most of
the reasons for flocking like this are
anti predator benefits so they are
coming together to reduce their chances
of being eaten so there’s a hundred odd
of you in the audience here so if a
lioness came streaming down the back
pasture bar into the room here because
you’re in a group of a hundred you have
a ninety nine out of a hundred chance of
being okay one of your gay okay so that
is if all else is being equal and this
is basically a selfish reason for
grouping you’re diluting the risk your
own risk of encountering a problem so
this is a selfish reason for flocking
selfish reason for grouping and it’s one
of the main reasons underlying the type
of behavior that you just saw the sheep
performing there and if you look at the
data which is behind behind us there I
said just now it’s you’d have
ninety-nine out of a hundred chance
actually you guys at the back and the
back right as I’m looking at you you
probably don’t have a 99 hundred chance
of staying alive because she’s going to
come streaming right at you so what you
need to do is get yourself into the
middle of the crowd to avoid being eaten
and that’s a process or a theory that
was proposed in the mid of the last
century by the late bill Hamilton and
it’s called the selfish herd theory so
that’s put in you somebody else
between you and harm’s way okay so it’s
a selfish reason for grouping and what
this graph shows you is the time since
the dog started approaching that dog
started running
then the distance of each sheep from the
center of the flock so if you’re already
in the center you stay in the center
you’ve got a nice safe place whereas if
you’re out on the edge you run health
leather into the middle of that flock to
avoid being at the edge so what we’ve
got is a selfish reason for flocking
although it looks highly cooperative
like they’re all working for each other
they’re in there they have very self
interests in what they’re doing how do
they do it
it looks quite complicated it happens
really fast suddenly all the sheep are
together and there’s a dog chasing them
and all happens very quickly the way
that we try and understand how they do
it is we build computer simulations of
the behavior that we’re observing so we
recreate the patterns we’ve observed in
the lab on a computer and see if we can
pick out the behavioral rules that the
individuals are following and what we
find time and time again whether we’re
looking at sheep or Birds or fish or
monkeys or crowds of people that simple
and local rules of interaction
so that’s movements between one another
create these global or group level
patterns of behavior and what I mean by
simple and local is that if you are too
close to another individual you move
away from them too far you’re attracted
to them
maybe you align your travel direction
with them and if you’re too far away
from them you accelerate and these
simple rules will create these
collective patterns of behavior which
you often see with bird flocks and
schools of fish so these are simple
local rules and we’ve got self selfish
interests and lying these social
interactions and this is what the
computer simulation looks like
and we have a lovely video showing you
almost exactly the same as we saw with
the real data and we can recreate these
patterns quite nicely but when we build
these models with these red dots and
these blue blue dots representing the
individuals that I’ve observed what we
don’t do is building at any diversity so
we assume every agent everything in this
model is anonymous and they’re identical
they’re following the exact same rules
but we know that animals are not exactly
the same and these are two fish from our
laboratory in Swansea and it’s speeded
up they’re not that fast and the one on
the bottom Lane you can see she’s moving
around that environment quite happily
she’s looking at a lot of it and you
probably haven’t even seen the top fish
she’s just sat in that plant and these
fish are two females the same age
they’ve been eaten eating the same in
the week they’ve been observed they have
the same experiences but one is much
bolder and more exploratory than the
other and the interesting thing is if we
retest these fish the week later we’ll
find the same thing not the exact same
behavior but the bottom fish will be
much more exploratory than the top fish
so these two fish have different
personalities and these different
personalities become really important to
their coordination so if we have to take
away this barrier in the middle and the
two fish can interact the greater the
difference in the two personalities of
the fish the more coordinated they are
in the behavior so if you have two very
similar personality fish and you see how
they coordinated it they do worse in
their terms of their coordination so the
diversity allows for coordination in
these fish and that’s something that we
find a lot in these animal systems when
we study them we find selfish interests
that are being followed with simple
rules but we also see that diversity can
elicit complementarity in social roles
and solve coordination problems so a bit
of a mouthful but we can represent it
with a cartoon on the other side here
two donkeys tied together with a rope so
they have to be together two food
sources as they both act exactly the
same way both try to lead or both try to
follow they’ll get nowhere okay very
simple you need some trait between one
of these donkeys that makes them act
first and the other to follow and you
get a leader follow a dynamic and
you both get to eat your food okay so
it’s a very simple thing you need
differences to create and enable you to
solve coordination problems so you’ve
got leader follower dynamics simple and
selfish rules underlying very
complicated looking behaviors that were
seen in the animal systems that we’re
studying and once you have these leader
follow-up dynamics you can find them
everywhere so on the right hand side
you’re seeing two ants these are little
tiny rock ants studied by colleagues of
mine in Bristol the ants at the front
she has some knowledge of a new nest
site it’s a real new great nest site
that she’s found and she’s leading
literally teaching the ant behind her
where that nest site is and the one
behind her is tapping her backside
following her to that new nest site okay
so she’s teaching her the way the guy on
the left is one of the baboons which we
studied in South Africa they have a very
strict linear dominance hierarchy he’s
the alpha male you often see him at the
front of the troop leading them around
their environment but he doesn’t lead
through enforcing others or coercing
them to follow he leads by example if
you like when he moves he tends to be
followed more often because he has many
more social ties and stronger social
bonds within that troop so it’s kind of
a follow a friend rule that works in the
baboons but again these are simple rules
they’re creating group level behaviors
and leader following dynamics so that’s
a kind of introduction to the work which
we do with the animal groups and I’ve
told you that they tend to be motivated
by self-interest because if you are able
to survive and reproduce better than
your neighbors those behaviors are going
to be passed into jet next generations
they are simple the rules tend to be not
very cognitively demanding and diversity
in groups allows you to have lead to
follow dynamics so thinking about us a
new lot you probably think of all we’re
not we’re not simple we’re not that
simple
and no we have people winning Nobel
prizes all of the time okay so this is
Harry Markowitz he won Nobel Prize for
working out how to allocate your money
if you want to maximize your income so
you’ve got a bunch of money you want to
work out how to allocate it he produced
a really
great algorithm for asset allocation
gotten the Nobel Prize but Harry when he
retired he didn’t use his old model of
how to distribute his funds
he used a very simple heuristic which is
just allocated his money equally amongst
the different funds he had available she
won a Nobel Prize for this idea
they didn’t even use it himself okay and
that happens all the time we are very
capable of making complicated weighing
up complicated ideas and decisions and
spending a lot of time on them but most
of you in everyday lives will use very
simple rules of thumb very simple
heuristics which are fast and they tend
to be on average accurate okay so that’s
the type of decision-making we use most
often on a daily basis not all the time
but we tend to be quite simple too okay
so now you thinking we’re not selfish in
Wales we are the most generous in the UK
well then II okay so how can this be how
can we be selfish if we in Wales are the
most generous in the UK well men
contribute more to charity when observed
by member of the opposite sex than by a
member of the same sex or no observer at
all okay and you men in the audience
when you’re in a relationship at the
start of that romantic relationship you
give more money if you walk past a
charity box then at the end of that
relationship okay so the act of giving
is obviously great because it benefits
the receiver whether you give time or
you give money but there are also
benefits to the actor in the giving and
in this case it might result in higher
reproductive success for the male by
showing off it’s a travesty okay so we
are selfish fundamentally as well at
some level these behaviors that we’re
performing allow us to survive and
reproduce at a better and quicker rate
than our neighbors who don’t perform
such activities so we are simple and we
are selfish and when we test people in
these sorts of environments these are
people wearing those loggers on their
heads which the sheep had on the
performing the foraging experiment
they’re collecting tokens and they put
them in the Box in the middle they
trying to maximise their own individual
benefits and this is what the data look
like and when they’re doing these sorts
of patterns of behavior what we find is
they are using simple rules they’re
copying each other a lot and when
they’re copying each other they’re not
copying each other at the same rate
they’re copying certain individuals in
these sorts of exercises and what we
find not only in our search but lots of
research over the past 30 40 50 years is
the factors like age sex height and
weight all play a major role in
determining our choice of leaders right
these are what people call hangovers
from our evolutionary past and what by
that Y mean is just a hundred thousand
years ago down in East Africa Homo
sapiens us started to colonize the rest
of the world so your ancestors in our
very recent evolutionary past were
hunting Buffalo on the savanna coping
with conflicts with other tribes trying
to live life in a very different
environment in which we live today and
in this sort of environment that your
ancestors lived in following a taller
more masculine person with more weight
might have resulted in increased access
to resources greater territory defense
of something more buffalos to eat okay
so in those circumstances those
heuristics those rules of thumb would
have operated and would have done very
well we live in Swansea many of you live
in Swansea in the Swansea region which
is very different from that environment
and Mark from vertically gov mining in
Holland he calls this a mismatch there’s
a mismatch between the environment in
which we live and operate now and the
evolved heuristics which we have for
following certain individuals so they
don’t match up and so I’ve got a couple
of examples to show you that this this
may be happening if you think about the
u.s. election where they have a
two-party to candidate system this is
the height of all of the presidential
candidates since 1900 first thing you
can see there’s the line across that’s
the average height of the US population
male population
for starters okay so straight away we
have a bias there’s very few female
it’s in the u.s. presidential elections
and then when we put the data up first
thing you can see is both winners and
losers are taller than average height in
the US and the winners tend to be taller
than the losers okay so in the absence
of other any information if you just
have to follow two people we tend to
follow the taller person faces there’s
some colleagues in Liverpool who did
some great work looking at how people
perceive faces when they’re choosing
leaders they took John Kerry and George
Bush’s face George Bush has a more
masculinized face than John Kerry then
they took him at an average face and
made it look 30% more like George Bush
or 30% more like John Kerry okay and
then they have these two faces and they
presented to a group of people and they
said okay all you have is these two
faces which one would you vote for and
what you see is George Bush like a face
pinches it 10% or so in it okay so just
on the faces they’re having a preference
for George Bush if you have another
group of people and you do the exact
same experiment and you say these are
the two faces who are you going to
choose and there is a wall run you are
at war with another country then
suddenly George Bush face wins by a
landslide
telling me there’s peace there’s no
problem no out-group conflict you have
to deal with internal problems in your
country and suddenly the John Kerry like
face works okay so these are heuristics
again these are evolved rules which
people are drawing on when they’re
making these decisions and in these
cases they don’t have any other
information to make decisions on so
they’re basing it on what they’ve got in
front of them and so I’d like to argue
that we are fundamentally simple selfish
and hung over in the ways in which we
interact socially and especially in the
ways in which we react to and choose our
own leaders add to that that we further
manipulate our environment we just had
general actions in the UK swansea west
where we are we’ve got constitution
trees all over the UK swansea west your
vote is worth more three and a half
times more than the average person
living in the UK because of the numbers
of people in Swansea West
and the balance of power amongst the
parties which are competing so the
average voting power is about not 0.35
so most people’s votes don’t count for
one vote and that’s why sometimes you
can have parties and leaders coming into
power which actually had less of the
popular vote than so the person who came
second so we manipulate the environment
that may enable or may change the ways
in which we can select our leaders as
well add on top of that once more that
we live in a global network now where
information is coming from us coming at
us from everywhere and a network in
which likes and retweets and all of
these things are valued then
misinformation kind of extreme views get
get passed around these networks very
quickly and as an example of the power
of the kind of wisdom of crowds this is
an ox in front of you here there was a
guy called Sir Francis Galton at the
turn of the last century and he went to
a country fair and there was a guest the
weight of the Ox competition and Galton
was interested in who who was coming to
this fair was going to be more accurate
at guessing the weight of the Ox whether
it was the butcher or they count until
the mathematician and what he found when
he took all of these gases that no one
person was a good was was accurate and
no one person got anywhere near the
weights of the ox but when he aggravates
and took the median value they were
within one pound of the true value of
the Ox okay so the collectively the
crowd knew the weight of the Ox but no
one individual did and this is a very
well-known phenomenon that was called
the wisdom of crowds and we recreated
this and we did it with jars of sweets
because we didn’t have any axes kicking
around okay so we had jars of sweets and
we said how many sweets do you think are
in the jar and we averaged these guesses
and as group size went up what we found
is that the blue line which is the real
number of sweets in the jar very slow
very quickly got to that average so the
number of sweets in jars can be
estimated very quickly with a large
number of people except what we did in
this experiment in another version of it
was leaked information into it so we’d
said to people guess the number of
sweets in the jar but we told them what
the last person
guests are we told them the average
guess or we told them a random guess and
as soon as you put information in that
system which isn’t their own everyone
over estimates the number of Suites in
that jar they completely think it’s
there’s way more sweets than there
should be both individuals and
collectively so you could overestimate
the value of something okay the point of
all that I’d like to make is that we
have a mismatch we aren’t too different
from the animals which I study we are
simple fundamentally selfish and we
definitely hung over we have these
biases these innate biases in how we
select and follow people the way we set
up our decision-making process is to
elect leaders and allow us to follow
certain people can buy us and sometimes
bias us towards these sorts of
heuristics and also we’re in an age
where information can very quickly be
changed and altered because it passed
through so many links in the network so
quickly so I like to think that when
we’re choosing our leaders in our sports
teams organizations workplaces political
leaders that we should take account of
the biases which we have overcome them
and select leaders which are fit for the
environments in which we live in today
you
hungover we’re going to have a little
think about leadership and I’m hopefully
going to provide you with a bit of a
different perspective and perhaps some
new ideas and we’re going to start
that’s me just start with an image from
my research it’s still bit in the corner
that’s me there and that’s a bunch of
sheep which I’m studying and this is in
Australia so much to the surprise and
delight of the local Australians that
Welshman went all the way to Australia
to study sheep one of the reasons I was
there was that I was able to get a
really great data set about these sheep
so I was interested in how they interact
with each other and what we were able to
do was put these backpacks on the sheep
so each of these little blue boxes
contain a GPS and those GPS devices tell
me where the sheep are every second and
how they’re interacting with each other
so I’m going to play you in a moment is
a little movie of the data that we
collected and this is the projection of
that data so these red blobs are the
sheep and this blue blob down here is a
sheepdog which I put the GPS collar on
here as well and so I’ll play it now for
you and you’ll see what happens when the
sheepdog approaches the Sheep and you’ll
see how they interact with each other
and how they respond to the doc
so there we are off she goes and they
all form a really dense flock and then
she sits behind them and starts moving
them down to this bottom corner so these
technologies allow me a really great
insight into what’s going on and they
provide us with data that we’ve never
had before and we can look at how
interact how individuals are interacting
in these places all right so when we
look at these
it’s nice fun to look at from this
aerial view but from my perspective as a
biologist I get to answer two questions
normally I’m interested in why the sheep
are acting like they are so what’s the
point of their behavior and then
secondly how they’re doing it so what
they’re doing to be enable them to
perform these types of behavior so the
why question is pretty similar to many
schools official flocks of birds most of
the reasons for flocking like this are
anti predator benefits so they are
coming together to reduce their chances
of being eaten so there’s a hundred odd
of you in the audience here so if a
lioness came streaming down the back
pasture bar into the room here because
you’re in a group of a hundred you have
a ninety nine out of a hundred chance of
being okay one of your gay okay so that
is if all else is being equal and this
is basically a selfish reason for
grouping you’re diluting the risk your
own risk of encountering a problem so
this is a selfish reason for flocking
selfish reason for grouping and it’s one
of the main reasons underlying the type
of behavior that you just saw the sheep
performing there and if you look at the
data which is behind behind us there I
said just now it’s you’d have
ninety-nine out of a hundred chance
actually you guys at the back and the
back right as I’m looking at you you
probably don’t have a 99 hundred chance
of staying alive because she’s going to
come streaming right at you so what you
need to do is get yourself into the
middle of the crowd to avoid being eaten
and that’s a process or a theory that
was proposed in the mid of the last
century by the late bill Hamilton and
it’s called the selfish herd theory so
that’s put in you somebody else
between you and harm’s way okay so it’s
a selfish reason for grouping and what
this graph shows you is the time since
the dog started approaching that dog
started running
then the distance of each sheep from the
center of the flock so if you’re already
in the center you stay in the center
you’ve got a nice safe place whereas if
you’re out on the edge you run health
leather into the middle of that flock to
avoid being at the edge so what we’ve
got is a selfish reason for flocking
although it looks highly cooperative
like they’re all working for each other
they’re in there they have very self
interests in what they’re doing how do
they do it
it looks quite complicated it happens
really fast suddenly all the sheep are
together and there’s a dog chasing them
and all happens very quickly the way
that we try and understand how they do
it is we build computer simulations of
the behavior that we’re observing so we
recreate the patterns we’ve observed in
the lab on a computer and see if we can
pick out the behavioral rules that the
individuals are following and what we
find time and time again whether we’re
looking at sheep or Birds or fish or
monkeys or crowds of people that simple
and local rules of interaction
so that’s movements between one another
create these global or group level
patterns of behavior and what I mean by
simple and local is that if you are too
close to another individual you move
away from them too far you’re attracted
to them
maybe you align your travel direction
with them and if you’re too far away
from them you accelerate and these
simple rules will create these
collective patterns of behavior which
you often see with bird flocks and
schools of fish so these are simple
local rules and we’ve got self selfish
interests and lying these social
interactions and this is what the
computer simulation looks like
and we have a lovely video showing you
almost exactly the same as we saw with
the real data and we can recreate these
patterns quite nicely but when we build
these models with these red dots and
these blue blue dots representing the
individuals that I’ve observed what we
don’t do is building at any diversity so
we assume every agent everything in this
model is anonymous and they’re identical
they’re following the exact same rules
but we know that animals are not exactly
the same and these are two fish from our
laboratory in Swansea and it’s speeded
up they’re not that fast and the one on
the bottom Lane you can see she’s moving
around that environment quite happily
she’s looking at a lot of it and you
probably haven’t even seen the top fish
she’s just sat in that plant and these
fish are two females the same age
they’ve been eaten eating the same in
the week they’ve been observed they have
the same experiences but one is much
bolder and more exploratory than the
other and the interesting thing is if we
retest these fish the week later we’ll
find the same thing not the exact same
behavior but the bottom fish will be
much more exploratory than the top fish
so these two fish have different
personalities and these different
personalities become really important to
their coordination so if we have to take
away this barrier in the middle and the
two fish can interact the greater the
difference in the two personalities of
the fish the more coordinated they are
in the behavior so if you have two very
similar personality fish and you see how
they coordinated it they do worse in
their terms of their coordination so the
diversity allows for coordination in
these fish and that’s something that we
find a lot in these animal systems when
we study them we find selfish interests
that are being followed with simple
rules but we also see that diversity can
elicit complementarity in social roles
and solve coordination problems so a bit
of a mouthful but we can represent it
with a cartoon on the other side here
two donkeys tied together with a rope so
they have to be together two food
sources as they both act exactly the
same way both try to lead or both try to
follow they’ll get nowhere okay very
simple you need some trait between one
of these donkeys that makes them act
first and the other to follow and you
get a leader follow a dynamic and
you both get to eat your food okay so
it’s a very simple thing you need
differences to create and enable you to
solve coordination problems so you’ve
got leader follower dynamics simple and
selfish rules underlying very
complicated looking behaviors that were
seen in the animal systems that we’re
studying and once you have these leader
follow-up dynamics you can find them
everywhere so on the right hand side
you’re seeing two ants these are little
tiny rock ants studied by colleagues of
mine in Bristol the ants at the front
she has some knowledge of a new nest
site it’s a real new great nest site
that she’s found and she’s leading
literally teaching the ant behind her
where that nest site is and the one
behind her is tapping her backside
following her to that new nest site okay
so she’s teaching her the way the guy on
the left is one of the baboons which we
studied in South Africa they have a very
strict linear dominance hierarchy he’s
the alpha male you often see him at the
front of the troop leading them around
their environment but he doesn’t lead
through enforcing others or coercing
them to follow he leads by example if
you like when he moves he tends to be
followed more often because he has many
more social ties and stronger social
bonds within that troop so it’s kind of
a follow a friend rule that works in the
baboons but again these are simple rules
they’re creating group level behaviors
and leader following dynamics so that’s
a kind of introduction to the work which
we do with the animal groups and I’ve
told you that they tend to be motivated
by self-interest because if you are able
to survive and reproduce better than
your neighbors those behaviors are going
to be passed into jet next generations
they are simple the rules tend to be not
very cognitively demanding and diversity
in groups allows you to have lead to
follow dynamics so thinking about us a
new lot you probably think of all we’re
not we’re not simple we’re not that
simple
and no we have people winning Nobel
prizes all of the time okay so this is
Harry Markowitz he won Nobel Prize for
working out how to allocate your money
if you want to maximize your income so
you’ve got a bunch of money you want to
work out how to allocate it he produced
a really
great algorithm for asset allocation
gotten the Nobel Prize but Harry when he
retired he didn’t use his old model of
how to distribute his funds
he used a very simple heuristic which is
just allocated his money equally amongst
the different funds he had available she
won a Nobel Prize for this idea
they didn’t even use it himself okay and
that happens all the time we are very
capable of making complicated weighing
up complicated ideas and decisions and
spending a lot of time on them but most
of you in everyday lives will use very
simple rules of thumb very simple
heuristics which are fast and they tend
to be on average accurate okay so that’s
the type of decision-making we use most
often on a daily basis not all the time
but we tend to be quite simple too okay
so now you thinking we’re not selfish in
Wales we are the most generous in the UK
well then II okay so how can this be how
can we be selfish if we in Wales are the
most generous in the UK well men
contribute more to charity when observed
by member of the opposite sex than by a
member of the same sex or no observer at
all okay and you men in the audience
when you’re in a relationship at the
start of that romantic relationship you
give more money if you walk past a
charity box then at the end of that
relationship okay so the act of giving
is obviously great because it benefits
the receiver whether you give time or
you give money but there are also
benefits to the actor in the giving and
in this case it might result in higher
reproductive success for the male by
showing off it’s a travesty okay so we
are selfish fundamentally as well at
some level these behaviors that we’re
performing allow us to survive and
reproduce at a better and quicker rate
than our neighbors who don’t perform
such activities so we are simple and we
are selfish and when we test people in
these sorts of environments these are
people wearing those loggers on their
heads which the sheep had on the
performing the foraging experiment
they’re collecting tokens and they put
them in the Box in the middle they
trying to maximise their own individual
benefits and this is what the data look
like and when they’re doing these sorts
of patterns of behavior what we find is
they are using simple rules they’re
copying each other a lot and when
they’re copying each other they’re not
copying each other at the same rate
they’re copying certain individuals in
these sorts of exercises and what we
find not only in our search but lots of
research over the past 30 40 50 years is
the factors like age sex height and
weight all play a major role in
determining our choice of leaders right
these are what people call hangovers
from our evolutionary past and what by
that Y mean is just a hundred thousand
years ago down in East Africa Homo
sapiens us started to colonize the rest
of the world so your ancestors in our
very recent evolutionary past were
hunting Buffalo on the savanna coping
with conflicts with other tribes trying
to live life in a very different
environment in which we live today and
in this sort of environment that your
ancestors lived in following a taller
more masculine person with more weight
might have resulted in increased access
to resources greater territory defense
of something more buffalos to eat okay
so in those circumstances those
heuristics those rules of thumb would
have operated and would have done very
well we live in Swansea many of you live
in Swansea in the Swansea region which
is very different from that environment
and Mark from vertically gov mining in
Holland he calls this a mismatch there’s
a mismatch between the environment in
which we live and operate now and the
evolved heuristics which we have for
following certain individuals so they
don’t match up and so I’ve got a couple
of examples to show you that this this
may be happening if you think about the
u.s. election where they have a
two-party to candidate system this is
the height of all of the presidential
candidates since 1900 first thing you
can see there’s the line across that’s
the average height of the US population
male population
for starters okay so straight away we
have a bias there’s very few female
it’s in the u.s. presidential elections
and then when we put the data up first
thing you can see is both winners and
losers are taller than average height in
the US and the winners tend to be taller
than the losers okay so in the absence
of other any information if you just
have to follow two people we tend to
follow the taller person faces there’s
some colleagues in Liverpool who did
some great work looking at how people
perceive faces when they’re choosing
leaders they took John Kerry and George
Bush’s face George Bush has a more
masculinized face than John Kerry then
they took him at an average face and
made it look 30% more like George Bush
or 30% more like John Kerry okay and
then they have these two faces and they
presented to a group of people and they
said okay all you have is these two
faces which one would you vote for and
what you see is George Bush like a face
pinches it 10% or so in it okay so just
on the faces they’re having a preference
for George Bush if you have another
group of people and you do the exact
same experiment and you say these are
the two faces who are you going to
choose and there is a wall run you are
at war with another country then
suddenly George Bush face wins by a
landslide
telling me there’s peace there’s no
problem no out-group conflict you have
to deal with internal problems in your
country and suddenly the John Kerry like
face works okay so these are heuristics
again these are evolved rules which
people are drawing on when they’re
making these decisions and in these
cases they don’t have any other
information to make decisions on so
they’re basing it on what they’ve got in
front of them and so I’d like to argue
that we are fundamentally simple selfish
and hung over in the ways in which we
interact socially and especially in the
ways in which we react to and choose our
own leaders add to that that we further
manipulate our environment we just had
general actions in the UK swansea west
where we are we’ve got constitution
trees all over the UK swansea west your
vote is worth more three and a half
times more than the average person
living in the UK because of the numbers
of people in Swansea West
and the balance of power amongst the
parties which are competing so the
average voting power is about not 0.35
so most people’s votes don’t count for
one vote and that’s why sometimes you
can have parties and leaders coming into
power which actually had less of the
popular vote than so the person who came
second so we manipulate the environment
that may enable or may change the ways
in which we can select our leaders as
well add on top of that once more that
we live in a global network now where
information is coming from us coming at
us from everywhere and a network in
which likes and retweets and all of
these things are valued then
misinformation kind of extreme views get
get passed around these networks very
quickly and as an example of the power
of the kind of wisdom of crowds this is
an ox in front of you here there was a
guy called Sir Francis Galton at the
turn of the last century and he went to
a country fair and there was a guest the
weight of the Ox competition and Galton
was interested in who who was coming to
this fair was going to be more accurate
at guessing the weight of the Ox whether
it was the butcher or they count until
the mathematician and what he found when
he took all of these gases that no one
person was a good was was accurate and
no one person got anywhere near the
weights of the ox but when he aggravates
and took the median value they were
within one pound of the true value of
the Ox okay so the collectively the
crowd knew the weight of the Ox but no
one individual did and this is a very
well-known phenomenon that was called
the wisdom of crowds and we recreated
this and we did it with jars of sweets
because we didn’t have any axes kicking
around okay so we had jars of sweets and
we said how many sweets do you think are
in the jar and we averaged these guesses
and as group size went up what we found
is that the blue line which is the real
number of sweets in the jar very slow
very quickly got to that average so the
number of sweets in jars can be
estimated very quickly with a large
number of people except what we did in
this experiment in another version of it
was leaked information into it so we’d
said to people guess the number of
sweets in the jar but we told them what
the last person
guests are we told them the average
guess or we told them a random guess and
as soon as you put information in that
system which isn’t their own everyone
over estimates the number of Suites in
that jar they completely think it’s
there’s way more sweets than there
should be both individuals and
collectively so you could overestimate
the value of something okay the point of
all that I’d like to make is that we
have a mismatch we aren’t too different
from the animals which I study we are
simple fundamentally selfish and we
definitely hung over we have these
biases these innate biases in how we
select and follow people the way we set
up our decision-making process is to
elect leaders and allow us to follow
certain people can buy us and sometimes
bias us towards these sorts of
heuristics and also we’re in an age
where information can very quickly be
changed and altered because it passed
through so many links in the network so
quickly so I like to think that when
we’re choosing our leaders in our sports
teams organizations workplaces political
leaders that we should take account of
the biases which we have overcome them
and select leaders which are fit for the
environments in which we live in today
you
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