As an avid reader of the late, great Isaac Asimov's fabulous "Foundation" novels in my miss-spent youth, I was thrilled to read this book. I see it as the first faint glimmering of the possibility of developing the kind of social science which Asimov described in his novels. Buchanan does a great job at exposing the failings of current economic orthodoxy and points to an entirely compelling way forward toward a future of evidence based social policy making -- the current lack of which seems to be pushing us rather strongly in the direction of a new Dark Ages.

I ordered this book because of a newspaper review I read. While it had it's merit, overall I was disappointed. Far better was The Psychology of Influence.

T. William Waltrip, M.D.

As a teaching economist, I've often felt that I should read such books as Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist. Occasionally my students have read them and they are surprised, given their commercial success, that I have not. Most students, admittedly, do not do outside reading, but there's also the chance that these authors will give me ideas I can use in class.

The Social Atom is, then, the first of the genre I've read and I'm disappointed. Buchanan rings the changes on old standards such as the Prisoners Dilemma and the Ultimatum Game, but he also allows himself to wander off into geopolitics and religion where his arguments are sometimes unsupported and at other times plain wrong. (Slovenia broke away from Yugoslavia peacefully, and indeed it is quite wrong to say that Yugoslavia itself "had for fifty years been heavily dependent on the Soviet Union... [and under] effective Soviet control" (page 156). This is startlingly wide of the mark, and makes me less willing to trust Buchanan when he strays in this way from his theme.

It's true that, amongst the stories about Tycho Brahe's beer-drinking pet moose and other such trivia, there are several illustrations that were new to me and, in some cases, quite intriguing. I'll note two. The first supposes that each of us has a threshold number in the sense that, if we are in a crowd and a number of people at least as great as this is rioting, then we too will join in. Suppose now that these numbers are distributed evenly amongst 100 people, from 0 to 99. One person will start the riot (having a threshold of zero), another will join in (with a threshold of one), and so on until all 100 people are participating in the riot. However - and this is the point - you need only suppose the absence of that single person whose threshold is one, and the riot never takes hold, never spreading beyond the first person. Buchanan tells this story (from Granovetter) on page 101, and uses it to tear down the representative agent model. On the contrary, he says, "a tiny difference in the character of just one person can have a dramatic effect on the overall group".

If the previous example depends on the idea that individuals imitate one another, the other case I'd like to single out focuses on human beings as adaptive creatures. Taking as his problem the desire we might have to go to a particular bar on nights when it isn't crowded, Buchanan (as always, citing the work of others) supposes that each person starts out with a variety of hypotheses (such as "go to the bar the day after it has been crowded") and, in the light of experience, throws out those which don't work and adopts those which are more successful - an ongoing process, requiring constant adaptation. Elaborating, Buchanan shows that when there are few players, a pattern may persist if none of them happens to have this pattern amongst his or her repertoire of hypotheses; the pattern will go unrecognized. When the number of players increases, though, the pattern will be jumped on by someone, whose success will in turn lead others to adopt it. With few players, then, there is a pattern; with more, there may be only random change. I must admit I found this illustration (on pages 74-5 and 83) to be well-explained and intriguing.

Overall, I'd suggest that people like me, who could do with a brush-up on their experimental social psychology and experimental economics, look for a book which develops examples such as the ones I've mentioned, but in a more focused way. And as for my students, I can't recommend this book to them since, in spite of its readability, I don't find it to convey very much that is either new or fundamental.

It is the best and worst book of scientific observations that I have ever read and therefore I rated it an average of one and five stars. The best part relates to his theory of social behavior that responds to my lifelong quest to understand such things as coincidences, trends, crises, and luck in human behavior, if not for wealth accumulation, at least to avoid negative occurrences. The patterns that result from chaos have always intrigued me, but now I understand how natural those patterns are in relation to atoms and riverbeds. Almost every sentence and every paragraph seemed to capture my own thoughts, observations, and speculations, including some of my theories that caused me to lose friends when they thought I spoke of their personal choices rather than the pattern of their cult.
The worst part of the book relates to the occasional cheap shot this "scientist" takes, exposing personal prejudices totally unrelated to his otherwise excellent theory. He blasts Christianity on page 39, FOX News on page 91, tax policy on page 188, and concludes the book with a rant against God and religion on pages 200-202. These cheap shots are both naive and misguided. While he totally dismisses the "miracles of a divine creator" and anyone who does not agree, there are far more open minded scientists who are trying to understand how and why God created the universe and everything within it. The big bang may not be a fluke.
The book is lacking in two significant areas. It never gets into quantum theory other than using the term. It doesn't even mention the totally random mutations in genetic DNA over the millennia that have resulted in the pattern of man.

I loved this book.

Mark Buchanan first caught my attention with the series of columns that he did for the N.Y. Tiimes earlier this year. I thought he brought a fresh perspective to some age-old problems, and I was anxious to read more by him. And his book doesn't disappoint.

Much like Malcolm Gladwell's work in "Blink" and "The Tipping Point", Buchanan excells at surveying the latest scientific research and theories and making them accessible to non-scientists like myself. (I hated physics in high school!) What makes this book especially valuable, however, is how he use insights from physics and math to explore such fundamental and important topics as altruism, segregation and violence. And lest you think it is too heavy, wait until you see how he illustrates the relationship between clapping at concerts and the adoption of new technology.

This book is both readable and stimulating, and will get you thinking in all sorts of new ways. I highly recommend it.

This book is both first rate science journalism and a genuine contribution to the field itself. As someone in this new area, I can assure readers that the author is accurate on the facts and the technical foundations. Moreover, the writing is clear and compelling - rare in a book about a set of diverse technical accomplishments.

The book's significant contribution, however, is to place this work in the right context and give it the right historical motion. The people doing the work the author discusses have a deep and shared intuition that there is a meaningful sea change in the way we can now pursue old problems. This is both exciting and fun. The author does an excellent job of articulating that intuition.

This is the type of book that I love most of all types. It covers an immensely interesting topic about human behavior, especially about human behavior in aggregate. As a research professor of psychology, I am well acquainted with many of the principles. Further, I believe the topic (if you are interested in it, and likely, even if you are not) is important since we humans are always interested in better understanding why things happen the way they do. Further, it deals with the fundamental issues of group vs. individual, and cooperation vs. competition. (Themes strongly related to my own area of research, which is commitment and sacrifice in marriage and family.) What Buchanan does well is describe a lot of complex phenomena that economists and psychologists have long attempted to quantify in models simple enough to be understandable and workable and complex enough to explain human behavior. The book is strong in laying out an understanding of deficiencies in a rational choice model of human behavior. The book is not as strong in laying out exactly what Buchanan means to say. It is really quite late in the book where you fully can realize what he's really trying to do here, which is to use the spontaneous organization principle that has become popular of late in theories of evolution to explain complex behaviors that appear to have utility and/or design. Further, the book amounts to a current, reasonable summary of ideas about how evolutionary processes can explain something that appears quite incompatible with Darwin: cooperation within groups, and therefore, the survival of groups as well as individuals by selection. Okay, that's what the book is about. It's not clear for a long time that this is what he's trying to do, but he gets there, and it's finally only clear in chapter 6.

Personally, I prefer a little more of a description of the destination before taking the trip, but that is preference. This is why I felt, at times, that the book loses focus and is frustratingly slow in getting to the point. At times a most interesting point is not explained clearly enough even as he's grinding it down from several directions. (Perhaps this is an example of wild fluctuations in the distribution of his thinking which revolves, too often, not tightly enough around part of the central thesis--fat tails. Read the book if you want to understand that point better.) So, what I did not care for about the book is really the author's style. The ideas are interesting. The book excels in the description of various experiments that revolve around explaining things that, at least, appear very complex, such as group cohesion and in-group, out-group behaviors (which are, of course, often quite negative). On the latter point, Buchannan does a nice job in showing how such behaviors serve very positive functions even as they also set up potential for very negative behaviors and acts. The examples are good; the literature cited is often superb. This makes, to me, the book worth the price of admission.

In my own area of commitment, the main ideas of this book have been fruitfully explored by social scientists (especially psychologists) and economists for decades. One clear point of intersection is in the theory or collection of ideas called "exchange theory" which deals fundamentally with the transformation of individual motives and evaluation of gains relative to inputs to cooperative, cohesive, group identity where the gains become associated more with the group's needs and identity than the individuals. My own work in commitment (much of which is translated into a self-help book focused on marriage, The Power of Commitment) focuses heavily on this area, especially noting by theory how transformative it is to have a long-term view on a relationship for all the reasons Buchannan gets at by a different literature in economics. But, it's the same stuff. And it's fascinating stuff. He get's it right that the most powerful transformation seems to come with long-term vs. short term perspectives (along with group identity). All of this applies well to marriages, families, community groups, and on. The hot area in my field at present directly relates to what Buchannan is analyzing, which is sacrifice between partners in relationship. It seems, in many studies in our lab and others to be a particularly salient, positive pattern in romantic relationships. Buchannan focuses a LOT on explaining (or trying to, because it's been a challenge for many for so long across fields) altruism. The emerging idea in my field is that sacrifice may have such particular potency in relationships, and especially marriage and family, because it strongly signals the conditions of non-competition and strong cooperation with the group. Okay, enough of that. Buchannan's book is an attempt to explain by current evolutionary thought what Thibaut and Kelly (1959, 1979) called the "transformation of motivation" or what economists such as Leik and Leik (1977) describes as what happens when one's identity with a group transforms their motivations into non-competition (commitment being, then, the situation between group members who were non-competitive with each other). Buchannan does a nice job of focusing on the other force, the remaining competition forces between my group vs. your group. One could note, btw, that sports have developed as one relatively healthy way to channel what are some of the, otherwise, negative aspects of my groups vs. yours in societies.

The downside to me of Buchannan's book is a tendency to overstatement, hyperbole, and "I've got the secret" that, for me, got annoying for the suggestion of immensely new thoughts, when what he really does pretty well is collect a lot of current and quite old thoughts about how one can explain what, has been considered in evolutionary theory, nearly unexplainable: cooperation and, even, altruism. He occasionally, and unfortunately, does not notice how he does the very thing he's really arguing is bad by the end of the book. The clearest example of this is in the last two pages where he takes some (not unjustified) swipes at religion. They are, of course, not unjustified, but they are unsophisticated. Here is perhaps one of the few places where he sees NO reason (it clearly seems his personal bias) to highlight the positive side of the organizing principles along with the negative. He could, in fact, have done something brilliant right at the end because he could suggest (I am in no way suggesting that he, himself, should do this) that a reasonable scientific endeavor could be to analyze religions of the world along three variables that would, perhaps, be illuminating in further testing his main ideas: tightness of the cohesion forces, rigidity of in-group vs. out-group dynamics, and, despite these forces, degree of emphasis within the belief system on charity to those not in the group. That is good science. If he were aware of much existing science he would find there are already interesting chunks of data here, including the basic fact that, at least in western cultures (where such studies tend to be done), those who are more religious tend to give the most to others who are not even part of their group. It's a pretty interesting question, that goes further steps beyond the conundrum Buchannan wrestles with, to consider how one explains that. It's a worthy question, but by the end of the book, Buchannan seems to show this one strong bias against traditional religious systems of cohesion while failing to note the positive aspects, even as he did for things like forces that lead to genocide. So, it was a bit disappointing that, at the very end, he does the very thing that he seems most motivated (yes, like any scientist, he is motivated toward some message) to suggest is a negative tendency in us all--and especially us humans acting in groups. He fails to his own bias there as well as some lack of awareness of data that exist, favoring the negative clichés as his data. But, all in all, it's a book worth reading provided you are interested in these themes.

This is the type of book that I love most of all. It covers an immensely interesting topic about human behavior, especially about human behavior in aggregate. As a research professor of psychology, I am well acquainted with many of the principles. Further, I believe the topic (if you are interested in it, and likely, even if you are not) is important since we humans are always interested in better understanding why things happen the way they do. What Buchanan does well is describe a lot of complex phenomena that economists and psychologists have long attempted to quantify in models simple enough to be understandable and workable and complex enough to explain human behavior. The book is strong in laying out an understanding of deficiencies in a rational choice model of human behavior. The book is not as strong in laying out exactly what Buchanan means to say. At times the book loses focus and is frustratingly slow in getting to the point. At times a most interesting point is not explained clearly enough even as he's grinding it down from several directions. (Perhaps this is an example of wild fluctuations in the distribution of his thinking which revolves, too often, not tightly enough around the central thesis--fat tails. Read the book if you want to understand that point better.) What I did not like about the book is really the author's style. The ideas are interesting, the examples are good, the literature cited is often superb. However, there is a tendency to overstatement, hyperbole, and "I've got the secret" that, for me, got annoying. I can recommend the book, but not wholeheartedly.

It was my pleasure to read an advance copy of Mark Buchanan's marvelous new book The Social Atom, for which I wrote the following blurb that appears on the back jacket:

"I devoured this book as if it contained the secret answer to the human condition-as indeed it might. To those who have watched the social world unravel in recent decades and wondered why we couldn't do better, Mark Buchanan offers a disarmingly simple solution: emulate the methods of explanation that have already proven themselves effective in the study of nature. The Social Atom is briskly written, informative, and deals with problems of the highest order. Read it and get a glimpse of the coming revolution in the social sciences." Lee McIntyre, author of Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior (MIT Press, 2006)

Now that the book is actually out I'm happy that I can finally say a bit more. One of the best things about this book is that it not only lays out a general philosophical program (be more scientific about the study of human behavior and you'll have a better chance of understanding and fixing a wide range of social problems), it also draws on many specific examples from a number of disciplines to show how this program is already being put into place. One of the previous posters in this forum lamented that it took a physicist to write this book, but in some ways that isn't surprising. Social scientists have sometimes seemed to barely notice the empirical revolution that is taking place right under their noses! This book isn't so much a manifesto, then, as a guidebook to the brilliant work that is already going on in some corners of the study of human behavior, placed within the context of the philosophical foundations that have always supported a more rigorous social science.

Like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, Buchanan has written a book that is clear and easy to follow and so it will draw the general reader into debates that have been circulating in the academy for years. But he has done so without compromising the depth and complexity of the subject so that, even those of us who have been working on these issues for years, he has advanced the debate. Philosophers, social scientists, the general public (and maybe even theoretical physicists) will learn much from this book.

This book is a wonderfully astute account of recent advances in the social sciences that is beautifully written and accessible to any literate adult. I despair, however, because as a social scientist I have to wonder why it takes a physicist to write such a book. The author might claim that only a physicist could have written this book. After all, the book advances a perspective Buchanan calls "social physics," a perspective that recognizes the free will of individual human atoms but still seeks to explain human social or collective patterns in the manner of physics, "where atomic-level chaos gives way to the clockwork precision of thermodynamics or planetary motion" (xi).

I am exaggerating when I speak of my despair, although I suspect that because many social scientists are needle-nosed specialists, most are incapable of Mr. Buchanan's synoptic vision. I do have a minor quibble with the author though and that is that at several points Mr. Buchanan takes his atomic/collective patterns metaphor a bit too seriously. It is after all just a metaphor. In fact, the brilliance of the book comes through not so much during its description of collective patterns--stock market fluctuations, rumors, neighborhood gentrification, crime waves, ethic violence-- but in the analysis of the features of atoms that make those patterns possible. The analogy with physics is interesting and arresting, but in physics one can literally be indifferent to the properties of individual atoms while explaining collective regularities, but, as Buchanan demonstrates very nicely, human social regularities arise directly from the (universal) properties or propensities of the human atoms. This is a roundabout way of saying that although the book as a whole is brilliant, the most important chapters are chapters 4, 5 and 6--"The Adaptive Atom," "The Imitating Atom," and "The Cooperative Atom." Each of these chapters describes a feature of human nature that is essential to our social lives and helps explain social patterns or regularities.

In the "Adaptive Atom," Buchanan draws mainly from the work of behavioral economists (especially Brian Arthur) that demonstrates the falsity of the "rational choice" model of human beings put forward by neo-classical economists. Rather than the omniscient, logical, calculating automatons neo-classical economists assume we are, the evidence is that we are adaptive agents--we take a step based upon a rule, idea, or belief and then adjust based upon the outcome (63). Our behavior is governed less by deduction than by trial and error. We recognize patterns, make predictions, and then adapt. Our decisions are typically made on the fly.

In the "Imitating Atom" Buchanan draws from a variety of social psychologists, sociologists and neuroscientists, to once again criticize an assumption of neo-classical economists, in this case the assumption that decisions are made by individuals in social vacuums. The evidence is that we are not isolated monads, but, rather, individuals who regularly seek information from others, especially in circumstances of insecurity, ambiguity and danger. Because of this propensity "social cascades" often result: behavior becomes more attractive the more people do it (103).

In the "Cooperative Atom" Buchanan draws chiefly from Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, Joseph Henrich, Ernst Fehr and Herbert Gintis--all evolutionary thinkers with interests in anthropology and behavioral economics--to drive the final nail in the coffin of "rational choice" theory. The basic point of this chapter is that naturally human beings are not purely self-interested but, rather, "strong reciprocators." We are capable of genuine kindness to those beyond family and friends and we also display righteous indignation toward free riders and those who violate the canons of justice. According to Buchanan and the authors from whom he draws, these features of our nature emerged not through individual competition within groups--such competition favors selfish traits--but via competition between different (cultural) groups. Two decades ago this position was considered heretical among evolutionary thinkers but the evidence has made it a perfectly plausible position among evolutionary social scientists in the last few years and I suspect it will be the consensus view within a few more years among those willing to consult the data.

This brief summary makes it sound as though the book is chiefly an argument against "rational choice" theory, which it is not. Given the importance of "rational choice" theory in economics and, to a lesser degree within sociology, demonstrating the profound failings of the theory is important, but Buchanan also gives "postmodernism" attention, dismissing it as silly claptrap. Additionally, he discusses the tiresome efforts of many social scientists "who have raised the flag of permanent defeat and busy themselves with rehashing the works of great thinkers of the past" (18) and yet other social scientists who mistake the identification of "correlations" for genuine explanations. The most important contribution this book makes, however, is not negative but positive. It is the truly fine summaries of the ideas of thinkers such as Richerson, Boyd, Hernrich, Fehr and Gintis who, along with similarly inclined social scientists, are working to advance and unify the social sciences on a sound empirical basis guided by an evolutionary theory of culture. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the most important recent work being done in the social sciences but I would also recommend that after reading the "Social Atom" one move on to the original sources as well. Richerson and Boyd's Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution or Henrich et al's Foundations of Human Sociality would be especially good places to start.

Brad Lowell Stone