Why can animal behaviors help managers?

This newsletter deals with organizational behavior to provide insights into bounded rationality behaviors that, according to Kahneman, are over 95% of our daily decisions. These decisions encompass choices such as the words we select to tell a fact, the people we prefer to collaborate with, those we prefer to avoid and those we obstruct, the activities we devote time to, and the objects we value.

The fundamental research question underlying this newsletter focuses on how individual choices generate collective behaviors by influencing each other.

Collective behaviors are challenging to predict because they do not result from the sum of individual behaviors but from their interaction. Moreover, individual behaviors are theoretically all independent, as each individual acts to maximize their objectives. Consequently, understanding what connects individual behaviors within a group is extremely useful for predicting whether an individual's behavior will trigger a wave of similar behaviors or remain isolated.

Similarly, by observing behaviors as adaptive responses to particular stimuli, predicting which environmental stimuli trigger certain collective responses is of extraordinary interest. For instance, understanding which system of incentives or punishments (positive or negative feedback) is likely to generate a specific collective behavior, e.g., increasing attention to waste segregation, increasing willingness to tax contribution, the adoption of new corporate software, the spread of an entrepreneurial mindset, etc..

Given the extremely complex nature of humans and the organizational contexts we have developed, the link between a stimulus and a response at both individual and collective levels is not deterministic. In other words, given a stimulus, there is no unique possible behavioral response, especially within the realm of 5% of rational behaviors associated with slow and reflective thinking. However, because 95% of behaviors are fast and automatic, to ensure the required speed, our brain relies on a limited set of options that generate stereotyped and predictable behaviors.

The main objective of the academic research underlying this newsletter is to contribute to this debate by mapping stereotyped organizational behaviors and matching them with animal behaviors.

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Why can the study of social animal behaviors help in understanding stereotyped organizational behaviors?

The most immediate motivation is that we, too, are animals. Therefore, verifying that other species exhibit analogous stereotyped responses can help in understanding the origin of these responses, distinguishing between biological (innate) and cultural (acquired) behaviors.

The main issue in this field is determining which animals to choose as models, and this is a crucial problem for all studies including animal models.?

Pharmacology, which has systematically employed animal models for over a century, has shown that to test the efficacy of a substance for humans, the animals selected as models are not necessarily those phylogenetically closest to humans. Otherwise, all drugs should only be tested on chimpanzees or bonobos.

Counterintuitively, studies conducted on animals distant in the evolutionary tree are interesting because the distance favors the connections between stimulus and response. The underlying principle of this experimental approach is the "evolutionary convergence," meaning if two animals distant in the evolutionary tree, with different cognitive abilities and living in different environments, have developed similar adaptations, the evolutionary response must be particularly robust.

Some might argue that the physiological response of an organism to a substance is different from a behavioral response. It is important to point out that human behaviors in this study are essentially "reactions" to perceived stimuli and thus closer to physiological responses than rational behaviors.

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The additional level of challenge in this process is to determine whether these behavioral responses are innate or learned. Learned behaviors include conditioned behaviors, such as those discovered by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s by conditioning dogs' responses to the sound of a bell associated with food.

Since then, scientists from various fields, from medicine to mathematics, have successfully tested the possibility of conditioning the behavior of any living being, from elephants to unicellular microorganisms.

The type of behavior that can be conditioned depends on the cognitive abilities of that particular species, but surprising analogies have emerged among species very distant in the evolutionary tree. These studies are fundamental to explaining social phenomena such as trends, social contagion, to mass manipulations.

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The research underlying this newsletter is a systematic study of the behaviors of numerous species of social animals, looking for novel frameworks applicable to human organizational contexts that can help in predicting or directing collective behaviors in various organizational settings.

The potential impact of these novel frameworks is relevant because they could help manage organizational hard problems such as various forms of resistance to change (e.g., refusal to adopt a new procedure, transition to new leadership, etc.) or the development of attitudes beneficial for the community (e.g., fostering collaboration among teams, developing an entrepreneurial mindset, etc.).?

These frameworks are the findings of an academic study that I'm conducting as DBA candidate at SDA Bocconi (Milan).

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Main references:

·????? D. Kahneman – Thinking, fast and slow (2011)

·????? N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler – Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human?behavior (2012)

·????? M. Muthukrishna et al. – The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history (2018)