The case for in-house social scientists

FT

August 14, 2013 4:12 pm

Review by Gautam Malkani

Untangling the We:What the Internet is Doing to You

By Aleks Krotoski

Faber and Faber, £12.99

A market research executive once told me that if businesspeople really wanted to understand consumers, they should ditch the MBAs and study sociology instead.

This was obviously a self-serving overstatement. However, 15 years later, the changes wrought by the internet on individuals and societies mean this proposed broadening of the business curriculum no longer seems ridiculous. Not just to encompass sociology, but also social psychology, media studies, cultural studies, pop-cultural studies and digital anthropology. In fact, why not throw in a little neuroscience as well?

Aleks Krotoski is a social psychologist at Oxford university’s Internet Institute and a journalist for the Guardian and the BBC. She is also the author of the latest book-shaped attempt to understand what the digital revolution is doing to people. The academia-meets-media credentials make for a tome that is both chatty and meaty. It is also free from the overplayed polemics that characterise all too many titles in this field.

As well as considering key academic studies in the area, Krotoski looks at what corporate thinkers have been discovering, before measuring both against her own insights. For instance, she examines the efforts by Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s in-house sociologist, to test the famous “Social Brain Hypothesis”. This theory was put forward in 1998 by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, and suggested that humans can only maintain 150 meaningful relationships – not 700 friends. “With the possibility for a technologically enhanced social circle comes a potential downside,” Krotoski concludes. “I call it ‘emotional anaemia’, the sense that what you’re getting from your online social group is emotion-lite.”

Krotoski’s approach proves particularly illuminating when exploring what motivates people to share personal data. Unlike those who argue that we sacrifice privacy in return for convenience, Krotoski offers numerous more satisfying explanations. “The privacy paradox, in which our attitudes say one thing but our behaviours say another, is more complicated than cost-benefit analysis,” she writes. “[Partly], we’re unable to imagine the vastness of the potential audience we communicate with when we’re online, so we treat the computer like a confidant . . . [Partly, it is] to compensate for an environment that is stripped of natural, interpersonal emotionality.”

However, the book is perhaps too quick to dismiss as doom-mongering the warnings from writers such as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows – not because his digital dystopian arguments may or may not prove correct, but because Krotoski contends: “Twenty years isn’t nearly enough time to reverse millennia of evolution.” This sidesteps research into neuroplasticity that suggests real reversals and alterations can occur during a person’s lifetime.

Otherwise, her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate and leads her to two refreshing conclusions. First, the web is not redefining people – people are defining the web according to their own innate needs and impulses. Second, companies should not assume that a consumer’s future behaviour can be predicted from their previous behaviour – though this idea could have been more fully explored.

Nonetheless, by crediting user-consumers with genuine agency, the book makes an even stronger case for businesses to swot up on social sciences.