Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today, you learn about how social structures can shape how we think and behave

with a special guest, Stanford economist Matthew O Jackson.

You'll also learn about a simple technique

that will instantly make you a better listener.

Let's set us fast some curiosity.

So it turns out that social structures

can not only shape the way we think and behave,

it can also inform our very outlook on life.

At least that's according to our guests today, Matthew O Jackson.

He's a professor of economics at Stanford University and the

author of a new book called The Human Network, How Your Social Position

determines your power, beliefs, and behaviors. In the book book he explains how social structures are human networks

shape how we think and behave. Here's what he told me when I asked how can social

structures hold back something as powerful as the human mind?

Yeah, I mean, there's one example I talk through in a book which is, I find always amazing.

There was a study in 1907 by a guy named Sir Francis Galton and what he did is he looked at a fair where people put in guesses on the weight of an ox.

So there was an ox there and this was in England. The ox weighed 1,198 pounds and he looked through 787 guesses so you know a wide range of guesses and people were all over the map in terms of the guesses, but the average guess was 1197 pounds.

So it was just one pound off of the actual, you know, and it, so it's somehow if you put all the people together they're really wise, you know, people, all our

information when it's aggregated can be really, really good. But the question is how you get that information. you know we're so one thing is we're we're in our own bubbles in terms of this homophily where we're segregated from other people so a lot of the information we're getting from people who think just like us, which biases us.

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