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By Root 963 0

by what other people are doing, similar groups of people can end up behaving in very different ways. This may not sound like a big deal, but it fundamentally undermines the kind of commonsense explanations that we offer for why some things succeed and others fail, why social norms dictate that we do some things and not others, or even why we believe what we believe. Commonsense explanations sidestep the whole problem of how individual choices aggregate to collective behavior simply by replacing the collective with a representative individual. And because we think we know why individual people do what they do, as soon as we know what happened, we can always claim that it was what this fictitious individual—“the people,” “the market,” whatever—wanted.

By pulling apart the micro-macro problem, experiments like Music Lab expose the fallacy that arises from this form of circular reasoning. Just as you can know everything about the behavior of individual neurons and still be mystified by the emergence of consciousness in the human brain, so too you could know everything about individuals in a given population—their likes, dislikes, experiences, attitudes, beliefs, hopes, and dreams—and still not be able to predict much about their collective behavior. To explain the outcome of some social process in terms of the preferences of some fictitious representative individual therefore greatly exaggerates our ability to isolate cause and effect.

For example, if you’d asked the 500 million people who currently belong to Facebook back in 2004 whether or not they wanted to post profiles of themselves online and share updates with hundreds of friends and acquaintances about their everyday goings-on, many of them would have likely said no, and they probably would have meant it. The world, in other words, wasn’t sitting around waiting for someone to invent Facebook so that we could all join it. Rather, a few people joined it for whatever reasons and began to play around with it. Only then, because of what those people experienced through using the service as it existed back then—and even more so because of the experiences they created for one another in the course of using it—did other people began to join. And then other people joined because those people joined, and so on, until here we are today. Yet now that Facebook is tremendously popular, it just seems obvious that it must have been what people wanted—otherwise, why would they be using it?

This is not to say that Facebook, the company, hasn’t made a lot of smart moves over the years, or doesn’t deserve to be as successful as it is. Rather, the point is just that the explanations we give for its success are less relevant than they seem. Facebook, that is, has a particular set of features, just as Harry Potter and the Mona Lisa have their own particular sets of features, and all of them have experienced their own particular outcomes. But it does not follow that those features caused the outcomes in any meaningful way. Ultimately, in fact, it may simply not be possible to say why the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world or why the Harry Potter books sold more than 350 million copies within ten years, or why Facebook has attracted more than 500 million users. In the end, the only honest explanation may be the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”

It may not surprise you to learn that many people do not particularly like this conclusion. Most of us would be prepared to admit that our decisions are influenced by what other people think—sometimes, anyway. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that once in a while our behavior gets nudged this way or that by what other people are doing, and it’s quite another to concede that as a consequence, true explanations for the success of an author or a company, unexpected changes in social norms, or the sudden collapse of a seemingly impregnable political regime may simply lie beyond our