Science Focus
original post »Everyone knows that you want skinny jeans tucked into your boots. Ten years ago everyone knew that you wanted boot cut jeans to go over your boots. But how does everyone know these things? How does one option out of all the possible alternatives get chosen as the standard and then reach universal acceptance?
The origin and emergence of social conventions has long beguiled cognitive scientists, sociologists, linguists, and philosophers. Prominent ideas have assumed that institutionalized mechanisms—like a centralized authority or incentives for collective agreement—are required for shared conventions to become prevalent. Newer social evolutionary ideas, by contrast, have suggested that networks of locally interacting individuals can spontaneously and unintentionally self-organize to produce global coordination, even in the absence of formal institutions.
This sort of self-organization has been very difficult to demonstrate, especially on any meaningful scale. Now, a mathematician and a sociologist have teamed up to show that global social conventions can in fact emerge spontaneously from local interactions, even though the people involved have no idea that they are coordinating anything. There's just one condition: the people have to be hyperconnected.
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» see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/92NMs61EO-0/
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