Abstract
People learn to respond to the world by acquiring and adapting schemas—recipes for dealing with particular situations. Such recipes can lead people to fall into habitual ways of thinking and acting. Habits make it possible for side effects of our activity to emerge without our being aware of them. This aspect of human behaviour makes us like the ants. One result is that a kind of natural selection works on people, creating unexpected social trends and patterns. Just as ants build their nests without conscious planning, so too social trends and patterns emerge as unexpected side effects of human activity. Examples include left-handers being good at certain sports and escalating differences in real estate prices.
The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. 1
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Green, D.G. (2014). Of Ants and Men. In: Of Ants and Men. Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55230-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55230-4_2
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Publisher Name: Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-55229-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-55230-4
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