By George ILIEV
Ants are famous for following each other's pheromone trail. This is how ants find their way home or to a food source. If given two possible paths, the shorter path ends up winning because more ants will follow it in a given time and more of them will leave their pheromone trace. Thus the signalling on the shorter trail will become more pronounced and this route will trump the longer trail.
An interesting conundrum, however, is presented to ants when a new food source appears that is not on their path. The ants still keep following their old path and rarely manage to reach the new food source. This form of stigmergy leads to absurd situations known as an "ant mill" where ants that have lost their original pheromone trail end up marching in a circle following each other and eventually die of exhaustion.
Human organisations and societies are different thanks to the existence of dissenting groups. In feudal times these were called rebels. Nowadays they are called "inventors", "early adopters" or "divergent thinkers" - people who do things differently.
Many prominent thinkers, from George Bernard Shaw to Elon Musk, have encouraged people to be different and start new things. G. B. Shaw says: "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
Yet, often times human society has found itself following the wrong pheromone trail. You may recall the VHS versus Betamax videotape format wars in the early 1980s, in which VHS won not because it was the superior standard but because more customers and producers had chosen it originally.
Another prominent case of path dependence in business is the establishment of the QWERTY standard of typewriters over another more modern standard.
We could even broaden the path dependence argument to religions. Once established they profoundly shape human culture and turn an area's population into conformist collaborators working towards the religion's objectives. Groupthink is not confined just to small groups but applies to entire societies.
So after all Kafka was right: at times we are human but there are times when we turn into insects. Beware of the pheromone trail.
Photo: Ant trail. Source: Wikipedia
