Working in Movement

We all know people can easily resist pressure from friends overtly or implicitly urging us to do something. And we know people who can't. 

A recent widely reported study even suggests that obesity gets transmitted this way, from friend to friend. Not any organic thing, but as ideas about what’s acceptable body image and behavior stuff. Not really that surprising when you stop to think about it.

But what is it that makes some of us so eager to go along with the crowd? Another recent study looked into what was happening in the brains of kids who described themselves as resistant to peer pressure and those who said they weren’t resistant. Turns out the peer-resistant kids had less brain activity, but a more coordinated brain pattern than those who said they weren’t peer-resistant. So there is at least some neurological component at work here, at least as far as kids looking at pictures inside an fMRI. That is, until someone comes along with another study that says just the opposite. (It happens.)

What this really opens up for me is a nature/nurture question. If you really can resist peer pressure, is it because of structural things going on inside your brain, or because your environment has provided opportunities to learn to just say no when the overwhelming sentiment is to say yes. Probably it’s some combination.

I’m hoping that The Agile Gene will be able to shed some light on this sort of thing. Author Matt Ridley writes with a kind of clarity and flair that makes reading about science and philosophy more fun than you’d think it would be.

Interestingly, I first head of Ridley while driving and listening to a podcast of All in the Mind from ABC radio in Australia. Unable to resist the pressure to get his book, I veered into the parking lot of a Borders bookstore that happened to have it in stock.

I just couldn’t say no.