Alex Pentland > Quotes

“It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people usually think of as driving group performance—i.e., cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction—were not statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking. The second most important factor was the social intelligence of a group’s members, as measured by their ability to read each other’s social signals. Women tend to do better at reading social signals, so groups with more women tended to do better (see the Social Signals Special Topic Box [at the end of Chapter 7]).”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: how good ideas spread — the lessons from a new science

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty, because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“Only once we understand how social interactions work together with competitive forces can we hope to ensure stability and fairness”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“strong social ties create the conditions in which peer pressure is the most effective mechanism for promoting cooperation.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“the more active the social tie, the greater the level of cooperation.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“These bursts of exploration—shopping trips, days off that are spent wandering around the city, weekend getaways—seem to be important in growing the local ecology of cities. If we looked at cities with greater than average rates of exploration in the credit card data, we found that in subsequent years they had a higher GDP, a larger population, and a greater variety of stores and restaurants. It makes sense that more exploration, which results in a greater number of interactions between current norms and new ideas, would be a driver of innovative behavior.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“Copying other people’s successes, when combined with individual learning, is dramatically better than individual learning alone.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“cooperation is just as important and just as prevalent in human society as competition.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others—e.g., rowing together, dancing together—our bodies release endorphins,”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“the main source of competition in society may not be among individuals but rather among cooperating groups of peers.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“We can no longer think of ourselves as only individuals reaching carefully considered decisions; we must include the dynamic social effects that influence our individual decisions and drive economic bubbles, political revolutions, and the Internet economy.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: how good ideas spread — the lessons from a new science

“we are now coming to realize that human behavior is determined as much by social context as by rational thinking”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“Working together also requires more than shared habits; it requires habits that result in cooperation.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“We can now watch human organizations evolve on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis and examine all of the interactions among millions of people.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“proliferation of mobile phones makes it possible to leap beyond demographics to directly measure human behavior.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“Put another way, social physics is about how human behavior is driven by the exchange of ideas—how people cooperate to discover, select, and learn strategies and coordinate their actions—rather than how markets are driven by the exchange of money.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

“We learn common sense almost automatically, by observing and then copying the common behaviors of our peers.”
― Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter