Alexis III
As a final homage to the timeless observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835), there is a lot to learn from his description of the constant pursuit of material (and rapid) gratification, of people who are "restless in the midst of abundance." What he describes in the quote here is the decoupling between the need for long-term goals, long-term thinking and solid foundations from the ubiquitous opportunities for short-term gratification that seem to make more complex intellectual endeavors obsolete. And that was a few years before the Internet.
“The passion for worldly welfare then defeats itself, and, without perceiving it, throws the object of their desires to a greater distance.
There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune, they lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold.”
Picture and quote: link
Human foragers are not that different from other animals. Or from slot machine addicts.
In a study published in Science Magazine (High-precision tracking of human foragers reveals adaptive social information use in the wild, link), the researchers observed ice-fishing competitions in eastern Finland to understand decisions about where to fish and when/where to move.
In a nutshell, although it is a nice study, it tells us exactly what you would expect: "Ice fishers go to areas where other individuals are fishing. This social information is integrated with their own catching success: When ice fishers catch fish, they move to nearby areas, but they move further away when not catching any fish." Wow. They used computational modeling to "find that the social context is an important source of information for deciding where to go."
Imitative behavior is a powerful force in many animal species when it comes to finding food, shelter or responding to threats. As for human behavior, imitation has been amplified by technology in social echo chambers. Driven by FOMO and this-guy-must-know-more, we tend to follow others, often blindly, as in a gold rush. One place where you can observe it is at a casino, where the delightful sound of winning at a slot machine attracts eager gamblers to join in the luck. When sampling the environment, we like to make sure to take other people's success, or lack thereof, into account.