Mechanical man?

I have a new article out in New Scientist, in case anyone might be interested. It explores the idea that perhaps we humans aren't the uniquely conscious and rational animals we think we are, but act on a much more instinctual and mechanical basis, our actions often being determined by stimuli in our environment. I've touched a little on the work of Alex Pentland, whose experiments I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, and also the experimental work of psychologists John Bargh of Yale University and Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam.

To read a little of the original research, I suggest looking at this nice paper of Pentland, which explores two interesting ideas. First, that traditional behavioral science makes a big mistake by looking first to our rational thinking and verbal communications to explain what we do. He suggests that the baseline assumption should instead be that we, like other animals, often act for reasons that we're not really aware of, and communicate with other through instinctual and non-verbal means. In experiments, he shows that most of what we do (especially in our routines) can be accounted for in this simpler way. Second, he also argues -- and this I think is really interesting -- that our intelligence doesn't actually reside at the individual level, but at the level of the group. In other words, it's not the cleverness in our individual heads that makes people so capable, but the delicate and effective non-verbal communications that bind us into cohesive groups with agile collective behavior.