Two to three decades ago, parents couldn’t get enough of the names “Jessica” and “Jennifer” for their little newborn girls. They had been mainstays on the Social Security Administration’s top 10 most popular female baby names for roughly 25 years.
“Jessica” had peaked a decade or so after “Jennifer,” but in the mid-2000s, both saw a shift. These once-ubiquitous names had reached some kind of tipping point, and quickly plummeted down the list. Suddenly “Jessica” and “Jennifer” had become uncool in the eyes of new parents, who preferred names like “Isabella” and “Madison.”
Trends like baby names ebb and flow, seemingly without any rhyme or reason. The same goes with slang words and fashion — the term of endearment “boo” has become “bae,” and jeans nowadays are skinnier than ever. But how does a style or word rise up from utter nothingness to becoming the latest hot thing?
While some believed a central institution or figure had to be behind a skyrocketing trend — say, Kim Kardashian or Vogue magazine — researchers have discovered through a new Web-based experiment that doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, the study suggests that populations can come to a consensus about what’s cool and what’s not in a rapid, yet utterly spontaneous way.
“Things take over very quickly, and they also sometimes have a short half-life,” said philosopher Brian Skryms of the University of California at Irvine, who was not involved in the study. “Think about teenage slang: How do you say something is good? Is ‘awesome’ in now? It changes, and if you use the wrong term, then you’re out of it.”
The idea of spontaneous emergence, has been around for decades. However, this study marks the first time it has been observed experimentally in a population of almost 100. The results were published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Spontaneous emergence is like the existence of an invisible hand,” said study author and physicist Andrea Baronchelli of City University London. “Everybody is just trying to agree with their social circle, and spontaneously there will be the emergence of a single consensus.”
Take “spam,” for instance. Now it means junk email, but in the past, its only association was with the canned meat. The likely explanation for the word first being used for email originates in a Monty Python sketch.
“They go to a restaurant, and on the menu, spam is everywhere: Egg, bacon, and spam. Spam, spam, egg, and spam. So it is something annoying that is everywhere,” he said. “In the beginning, there were many other names like ‘junk email,’ but somehow without anyone telling us that we should agree, we use ‘spam’ as the way that we should refer to email that we don’t want to receive.”
Then a large institution like Google used “spam” for their email client Gmail, which further reinforced the term. But at that point, we as a population had already decided on “spam.” In other words, it had become a social convention.
“Conventions are the fundamental bricks of our social lives – from the way we greet each other, like shaking hands, or how we dress, like a tie,” said Baronchelli. “If you think about it, a tie is a ridiculous piece of clothing.”
To experimentally test for how conventions arise, Baronchelli and co-author Damon Centola of the University of Pennsylvania had online participants play a Web-based game, “The Name Game,” against one another. First, a photo of a human face appears on the screen, and the game asks Player 1 to come up with a name for that face. Simultaneously, Player 2 does the same, and if the names match up, both players get a reward. If not, each received a penalty and saw what the other person put for a name.
This went on for several rounds with the same photo, and each time players were switched up randomly to face another person in the game. Baronchelli and Centola found that how people are connected will determine whether these spontaneous trends will go global or stay confined within smaller local pockets.
When participants were arranged geographically and restricted to play only against their nearest few neighbors, they would quickly agree on names within their region. But for the game as a whole, there would be several names competing for dominance with no global consensus.
“We see this regionalism in the U.S., where people use certain words in the South vs. the East vs. the West,” said Centola. He suggests this type of geographic network can explain the “soda”/”pop”/”coke” phenomenon and other regional divisions in lingo.
Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia.
