What’s trending today?

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Way back when I was still having kids (no, not me, silly- my wife), I noticed the crazy trends in kids names.  (I didn’t fall prey to that trend- but mostly because I used religious names for my kids.   Yet, my middle daughter got caught up in that – because of a TV program She-Ra, Princess of Power.   Wrong spelling, right sound.)

I never did figure out how these names became trendy.  Or how slang terms take over our vocabularies.  And, to be honest, I never studied the science (or not) behind those trends, how folks can reach such quick consensus in what seems to be an utterly spontaneous fashion.

But, Drs. Damon Centola (University of Pennsylvania) and Andrea Baronchelli (City University, London) studied the concept of spontaneous emergence- and extended the studies to a population of up to 100.  (It was only tested in very small groups prior to this research.)  They published the findings in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

They noted that conventions (i.e., what we call something, how we consider items) are social interactions.  How we dress, that we shake hands (as opposed to rubbing noses?) are the conventions we’ve adopted in our society.

the Name Game

So, how did they study the development of social conventions?  With an internet based game, of course.  (It’s the “Name Game” from MIT and Penn.) Once a face appears on the computer screen, the game requires the first player to name the face- simultaneously with player 2.  Should the names be identical- the players are rewarded; if not, they are penalized- but were notified of the names chosen.  This game continues for a few rounds (all with the same countenance), and the players are randomly rotated to play with another.

Interestingly, the names chosen go “global” if the folks are connected in some fashion- or they just stay “local”.   When the game was played with the nearest neighbors (they were geographically matched), the agreement was reached rapidly.  But, as the geographic boundaries were extended, there were competing name choices and no consensus.  The researchers feel this is similar to the quirkiness we all demonstrate as we describe flavored beverages as soda, pop, or Coke, dependent upon our region of origin.

When the game was played without any geographic constraints- as if everyone was connected via the world-wide-web (www, in case you didn’t know from where those letter arrangements arose), they found a two phase result.  Initially, the results were chaotic- new names appeared each round.  But, with subsequent play (somewhere between the 10th and 12th round), the trend towards one name took hold.  And, it wasn’t necessarily the names that were popular in the smaller networks.  (Yup.  We can’t predict the winning name.)

So, if there’s no central authority, one that drives us to consensus (and remember- that doesn’t mean the result is correct- just the majority), there’s no way to easily predict the result- or when it takes hold.  But, maybe with time…

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