Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [31]
Social systems are also replete with interactions—between individual people, between individuals and firms, between firms and other firms, between individuals, firms, and markets, and between everyone and the government. Individual people are influenced by what other people are doing or saying or wearing. Firms are affected by what individual consumers want and also by what their competitors are producing, or what their debt holders require of them. Markets are affected by government regulations as well as by the actions of individual firms, and sometimes even of individual people (think Warren Buffett or Ben Bernanke). And governments are swayed by all manner of influences, from corporate lobbyists to opinion polls to stock market indices. In the kinds of systems that sociologists study, in fact, the interactions come in so many forms and carry such consequence, that our own version of emergence—the micro-macro problem—is arguably more complex and intractable than in any other discipline.
Common sense, however, has a remarkable knack for papering over this complexity. Emergence, remember, is a hard problem precisely because the behavior of the whole cannot easily be related to the behavior of its parts, and in the natural sciences we implicitly acknowledge this difficulty. For example, we do not speak of the genome as if it behaves like a single gene, nor do we speak of brains as if they behave like individual neurons, or ecosystems like individual creatures. That would be ridiculous. When it comes to social phenomena, however, we do speak of “social actors” like families, firms, markets, political parties, demographic segments, and nation-states as if they act in more or less the same way as the individuals that comprise them. Families, that is, “decide” where to go on vacation, firms “choose” between business strategies, and political parties “pursue” legislative agendas. Likewise, advertisers speak of appealing to their “target demographic,” Wall Street traders dissect the sentiment of “the market,” politicians speak about “the will of the people,” and historians describe a revolution as a “fever gripping society.”
Everyone understands, of course, that corporations and political parties, even families, do not literally have feelings, form beliefs, or imagine the future the way individual people do. Nor are they subject to the same psychological quirks and biases that I discussed in the previous chapter. At some level, we know that the “behavior” of social actors is really a convenient shorthand for the aggregate behavior of large numbers of individuals. Nevertheless, it is so natural to talk this way that the shorthand has become indispensible to our ability to explain things. Imagine trying to recount the history of World War II without talking about the actions of the Allies or the Nazis. Imagine trying to understand the Internet without talking about the behavior of large Internet companies like Microsoft or Yahoo! or Google. Or imagine trying to analyze the debate over healthcare reform in the United States without talking about the interests of Democrats or Republicans, or “special interests.” Margaret Thatcher was famous for having said “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”7 But if we actually tried to apply Thatcher’s doctrine to explaining the world, we wouldn’t even know where to start.
In social science, Thatcher’s philosophical position goes by the name of methodological individualism, which claims that until one has succeeded in explaining some social phenomenon—the popularity of the Mona Lisa or the relation between interest rates and economic growth—exclusively in terms of the thoughts, actions, and intentions of individual people, one has not fully succeeded in explaining it at all. Explanations that ascribe individual psychological motivations to aggregate entities like firms, markets, and governments might be convenient, but they are not,