Coincidences... -- Mark Buchanan

A few years ago, I experienced a very strange coincidence. I emailed a physicist at the University of Chicago (I can't recall who now, maybe Tom Witten) with a couple questions on some of his work. He wrote back with some answers, and then put a P.S. in the email: "Say hello to Haim Diamant."

Now I'd never heard of Haim Diamant, so I wrote back saying, "Thanks for your response, but who is Haim Diamant?"

In a few hours I got another email: "Is it really possible," he wrote, "that there could be two Mark Buchanan's, both physicists and both living in France?"

As it turns out, there were, me, and Mark Buchanan, a physicist who had formerly worked in Chicago (now at the University of Oslo), and who emailed me the following day. It's a very odd experience getting an email from someone with your exact name. Anyway, I've followed Mark's work over the past few years; curiously, we not only share the name but a deep interest in the same kind of physics, the physics of liquids and solids, pattern formation, the spontaneous emergence of collective organization, and so on. Strange.

I mention this because I just had another weird coincidence today, getting an email from one Mark Earls who has written a book quite similar to my The Social Atom. His book is called Herd, and, while I have't read it yet, it looks very interesting. I just visited his blog, and noticed one very interesting comment on a cognitive bias that most of us have...

"we find it really much easier to respond to individual others than to the confusion of the group. It's easier to think of the face in the crowd than the crowd. Now there's a psychology insight that might be useful... "

Indeed, Nicolas Kristof wrote a very powerful essay in the New York Times on just this issue in May. He cited some experiments that show people respond with more generosity to a photo of one starving child, with a face and name, that to a verbal plea for aid for starving millions. A brief excerpt:

"In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia -- but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia's suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern."

I'm not sure what evolutionary psychologists would say, but it seems reasonable to speculate that we're just not evolved to think properly of hundreds or millions of people. Our ancestors spent their lives overwhelmingly in groups of at most 25 to 30 people, and usually in sub-groups of far fewer, and they evolved to make good decisions in those contexts. Nothing in evolution has prepared us for the massive collectivity we experience today.