by david allan van nostrand | Oct 27, 2016 | Conformity, Items in the News, Technology
Enough With the Wacky Safety Videos, a recent WSJ article, tells us how it has become the norm among airlines to produce big-budget safety videos, and how customers are reacting to this phenomenon. Airlines, emphasizing entertainment over information, think these new...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 20, 2016 | Conformity, Fads, Human Behavior
New generations take every bit of today’s technology for granted. They have never known life without mobile phones, smart phones, tablet laptop computers, digital music, on-demand video, streaming, and so on. When products in each of those technological product...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 17, 2016 | Conformity, Human Behavior, Status
A hundred years ago, a new comic strip was published in the New York Globe. Called Keep Up With The Joneses, it featured the adventures of a family vainly trying to keep up with their well-to-do neighbors. Mr and Mrs McGinis and their daughter were social climbers,...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 17, 2016 | Conformity, Constant Contact, Human Behavior, Technology
In an earlier century, Fear Of Missing Out was not being able to talk about last night’s episode of All In The Family, or Cheers, or 60 Minutes, or Seinfeld. Now it’s the fear of not knowing what’s hottest and most current, what’s breaking and what’s trending, and...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 14, 2016 | Conformity, Human Behavior
As much as we humans like to think of ourselves as sophisticated, there are many things we do at animal level. One of these is herd behavior, our tendency to blindly follow the lead of others and go with the group. And while this is often a choice, as when we follow...
