Paying attention to the actions and advice of peers is often a reliable strategy for doing at least reasonably well in a complex and unpredictable world. From choosing graduate programs to movies, many people consistently opt to minimize potential risk, whether to their career prospects or their evening's entertainment, by observing and emulating the actions of others. Even where we explicitly eschew the majonty, we are rarely behaving entirely as atomistic individuals or as pure contrarians. Rather, we typically have in mind some minority group of actors whom we do wish to emulate. The difference between conventional and unconventional social actors, therefore, is not so much that the unconventional ones don't pay attention to others—it's just that they are not the same others as for the conventional actors.

iVhether we are aware of it or not, we rarely, if ever, make decisions completely independently and in Isolation. Often we are conditioned by our ci Viistories, and our culture. We also can t help but be influenced by the mesmerizing pool of universally available, often media-driven information in which we continually swim. In determining the kind of person that we are and the background pictnrp acrainst which our lives play out, these generic influences determine both the expertise and the preferences that we bring to any decision-making scenario. But once we are in the scenano, even our expenence and predispositions may be insufficient to sway us entirely one way or the other. This is where externalities - whether Information, coercive, market, or coordination externalities - enter to play a crucial les to shove, humans are fundamentally social creaures, and to ignore the role of social Information in human making - to ignore the role of externalities - is to misconstrue the proress by which we come to do the things we do.