Just to respond to you comment about copying only working as a mechanism for change if you’ve already changed someone’s behaviour so that others can copy from it, I think – as is often the case with behaviour change you’re missing some of the important things about how behaviours spread through populations and perhaps focussing a bit too much on changing the behaviour of an individuals. Surely the issue for anyone in marketing or policy is not what an individual does but what large numbers of them – a community or population – do?

First, it’s abundantly clear that things – ideas, feelings, behaviour spread through populations by individuals copying something they see around them – “social learning”, in the jargon. we can’t help it. We do it from morning to night, from immediately after birth to the day we die.

While we’d like to believe otherwise, its very rare than its the unique quality of the thing – the idea, the feeling, the behaviour – that makes it spread; rather, it’s the fact that (at least one/some) other people are doing it and that any given individual can see it.

In some instances, we copy authoritative or “influential” figures. In others, it’s just what folk round here do. Sometimes these choices get embedded as social norms into what we call cultural practices and become invisible (think of the rules we have in Europe for how to lay out the food on a plate); sometimes the choices visible to us are more fluid.

Equally, sometimes we copy what seems to be becoming more popular – fashion and style and music and bars and sometimes we seek to avoid what’s popular. It varies by context and over time.

The truth is for most choices, you can do all the hard work by thinking it through yourself (which is what most behaviour change interventions encourage). Or, you can use the brains and behaviour of those around you to outsource you decision to. This is why the UK Govt. Behavioural Insight Team found that the best way to get people to file their tax returns on time is to manage their perceptions of what others had done (“9 out 10 people like you have already filed…”

And there’s always someone doing weird shit, if you look hard enough.