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The psychology of swarms and how to harness it
By Ni Tao |
February 27, 2010, Saturday
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IMAGINE this scene: You are sauntering along Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall. Suddenly you see people swarming together up ahead, all of them standing still with their faces turned upward. "That's strange," you think. "I must go have a look." You ask one person what's going on.
He shrugs, he has no idea. Even more curious now, you too look upward but nothing odd or intriguing meets the eye. Yet the crowd keeps growing, staring expectantly up at something invisible to the naked eye. The spectacle reminds one of little cats tantalized by a fish dangling above their heads.
Finally one person looks down and starts to leave. The next person, who was one of the first to stare upward and initiate the collective sky gazing, asks what held his attention for so long on a street teeming with pedestrians.
"I just had a nose bleed," says the man who first tilted his head back and stared upward.
Did you have a good laugh? This is not just a punch line of Zhou Libo, the king of local jesters who's keeping this town in stitches.
Similar hilarious things happen all the time. A person looking down at the sidewalk on Nanjing Road finds himself surrounded by others doing the same thing. Actually, he's just looking for his contact lens.
Why would otherwise sensible individuals mindlessly follow and join a swarm, when there's no clear motivation to unite their action? This is a question popular science writer Len Fisher explores in his book "The Perfect Swarm."
The title says a lot about content. Fisher believes that a swarm, even if it's apparently leaderless, can produce "swarm intelligence" that guides group behavior. Examples abound. Schools of fish move as a group; ant colonies travel the shortest route between their nest and food; bees fly straight toward a target, and so on.
By contrast, an individual ant or fish, with limited knowledge, is likely to lose its compass and stray into the middle of nowhere. So what's the source of unison and purpose when thousands of them gather?
The adhesive that glues a swarm together, in the case of fish, is that every single one of them is supposed to "follow the fish in front" and "keep pace with the fish alongside."
For ants and bees, this basic principle applies as well, the only difference being that insects secrete attractive aromatic chemical substances such as pheromones or serotonin to attract more creatures to swell their ranks.
As Fisher is a scientist by training, it's no surprise that he is keen on inferring from these natural phenomena a general principle that also works for a wider segment of human society. He arrives at one of sorts.
Pedestrian flows in crowded transport hubs, like the one where Metro lines 1, 2 and 8 converge in Shanghai, can be so powerful that one is often swept along in the commuter surge during rush hours.
In response, clever urban designers would, as Fisher suggests, strategically place pillars in these heavily traveled places to make people step sideways, thereby easing congestion.
Contrary to Fisher's observations, swarm intelligence is not as "spontaneous" a choice as it seems. Although they may appear leaderless, many swarms of animals or human beings actually have a leader, whose presence is invisible, and not easily felt.
Consider a herd of sheep. Either grazing or moving slowly in all directions, the group appears unlikely to spring into collective action. They do, however. A crack of a whip or nip of a herd dog at the lead sheep is enough to bring the rest along. Shepherds know this perfectly well. To control the flock, they need not rope-in or tether an entire herd, but direct the movement of the lead sheep. The flock follows.
People are often the same, as our examples suggest.
While it sounds curious, swarm intelligence can be easily manipulated. French sociologist Gustave Le Bon's 1895 book "The Crowd" makes enlightening reading about crowd psychology. Le Bon argues that in a crowd "the sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes."
What Le Bon said about the collective unconscious state of swarms holds true when we examine many paradoxical situations today: countless people, all of them individually sane, are collectively buying into China's inflating real estate bubbles, even though they know housing prices won't remain unaffordable forever. This herd mentality gone amok is a farcical and dangerous extreme of the more benign swarm intelligence that Fisher investigates.
He shrugs, he has no idea. Even more curious now, you too look upward but nothing odd or intriguing meets the eye. Yet the crowd keeps growing, staring expectantly up at something invisible to the naked eye. The spectacle reminds one of little cats tantalized by a fish dangling above their heads.
Finally one person looks down and starts to leave. The next person, who was one of the first to stare upward and initiate the collective sky gazing, asks what held his attention for so long on a street teeming with pedestrians.
"I just had a nose bleed," says the man who first tilted his head back and stared upward.
Did you have a good laugh? This is not just a punch line of Zhou Libo, the king of local jesters who's keeping this town in stitches.
Similar hilarious things happen all the time. A person looking down at the sidewalk on Nanjing Road finds himself surrounded by others doing the same thing. Actually, he's just looking for his contact lens.
Why would otherwise sensible individuals mindlessly follow and join a swarm, when there's no clear motivation to unite their action? This is a question popular science writer Len Fisher explores in his book "The Perfect Swarm."
The title says a lot about content. Fisher believes that a swarm, even if it's apparently leaderless, can produce "swarm intelligence" that guides group behavior. Examples abound. Schools of fish move as a group; ant colonies travel the shortest route between their nest and food; bees fly straight toward a target, and so on.
By contrast, an individual ant or fish, with limited knowledge, is likely to lose its compass and stray into the middle of nowhere. So what's the source of unison and purpose when thousands of them gather?
The adhesive that glues a swarm together, in the case of fish, is that every single one of them is supposed to "follow the fish in front" and "keep pace with the fish alongside."
For ants and bees, this basic principle applies as well, the only difference being that insects secrete attractive aromatic chemical substances such as pheromones or serotonin to attract more creatures to swell their ranks.
As Fisher is a scientist by training, it's no surprise that he is keen on inferring from these natural phenomena a general principle that also works for a wider segment of human society. He arrives at one of sorts.
Pedestrian flows in crowded transport hubs, like the one where Metro lines 1, 2 and 8 converge in Shanghai, can be so powerful that one is often swept along in the commuter surge during rush hours.
In response, clever urban designers would, as Fisher suggests, strategically place pillars in these heavily traveled places to make people step sideways, thereby easing congestion.
Contrary to Fisher's observations, swarm intelligence is not as "spontaneous" a choice as it seems. Although they may appear leaderless, many swarms of animals or human beings actually have a leader, whose presence is invisible, and not easily felt.
Consider a herd of sheep. Either grazing or moving slowly in all directions, the group appears unlikely to spring into collective action. They do, however. A crack of a whip or nip of a herd dog at the lead sheep is enough to bring the rest along. Shepherds know this perfectly well. To control the flock, they need not rope-in or tether an entire herd, but direct the movement of the lead sheep. The flock follows.
People are often the same, as our examples suggest.
While it sounds curious, swarm intelligence can be easily manipulated. French sociologist Gustave Le Bon's 1895 book "The Crowd" makes enlightening reading about crowd psychology. Le Bon argues that in a crowd "the sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes."
What Le Bon said about the collective unconscious state of swarms holds true when we examine many paradoxical situations today: countless people, all of them individually sane, are collectively buying into China's inflating real estate bubbles, even though they know housing prices won't remain unaffordable forever. This herd mentality gone amok is a farcical and dangerous extreme of the more benign swarm intelligence that Fisher investigates.
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