...among people who design software for group use, human social instincts are sometimes jokingly referred to as "the monkey mind."

In his book The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and one of the most interesting and popular writers on the subject, describes an experiment involving two chimps placed in neighboring cages, with a table of food just outside the cages but still within their reach. The food table is wheeled, and either chimp can reach out to pull the table closer to its own cage (and farther from the other's). However, a "revenge rope" leading out from each cage is connected to the bottom of the table, rigged so that if either chimp pulls it the table will collapse and spill all the food onto the floor and out of reach for both of them. Researchers have found that if both chimps share the food, all goes well in this experiment. But if one chimp rolls the table too close to its own cage, the other will sometimes explode in a rage and yank the rope, collapsing the table. According to Ariely, "The urge to punish exists in animals, too....The similarity between humans and chimps suggests that both have an inherent sense of justice and that revenge, even at personal expense, plays a deep role in the social order of both primates and people."

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One of the single most important elements of industrial efficiency and technical progress is the concept of "division of labor." The original thesis behind division of labor was stated succinctly by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, with his classic description of the pin factory, where each task was divided into standardized steps to be completed more cost-efficiently by different people and machines. When an analogous principle is applied to nation-states we get the theory of comparative advantage, which underlies the benefits of free trade. Both division of labor and comparative advantage presume that people can perform separate tasks and then trade with each other for mutual benefit. Trading is critical. Without trading, among people and nation-states alike, progress is stunted.

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In all the hand wringing and advice giving that surrounds the hot topic of social media, one thing often overlooked is that networks of connected people have a certain type of structure, and this network structure provides some clues for how to extract benefits from your own social network. Essentially, every person's network of contacts, colleagues, friends and associates (online or offline) is actually a small cluster within a much bigger network, which in turn is just a cluster within an even bigger network, and so forth. Because of this structure, the most useful positions aren't those with the most connections to other people, but those with the most connections to other clusters of people. Rather than the "strong ties" you have with your closest friends or your immediate co-workers, in other words, the robustness and usefulness of your own social network will be based more on the number of "weak ties" you also maintain - that is, ties to the people you don't know quite as well, or don't interact with quite as often. These are the people most likely to be connected to clusters you aren't familiar with and don't have access to yourself.

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