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Course: PB101 – Foundations of Psychological Science

Assessment: Blog Post 2
Summative Component: This assessment counts for 20% of the overall mark in PB101

5 digit candidate number for 2021/22

This can be found on LSE for You. 2 9 5 5 1
Please note that candidate numbers change each year.
Innovation or Stagnation? What Social
Psychology Can and Can’t Teach Us
Blog Post Title:
About Innovation

Word Count: 1084

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 Innovation or Stagnation? What Social Psychology Can
and Can’t Teach Us About Innovation
How innovative are you? Probably more than me. Starting a blog with a rhetorical question is about
as generic as it gets!

My cheesy introduction aside, what if I was to tell you that understanding innovation (specifically,
why some societies are better at it than others) is crucial to understanding the story of humanity.
You’d surely want to understand more, wouldn’t you? (There I go again!) Well, if so then you’ve
come to the right place. This blog will arm you with a technical understanding of innovation, and
then apply it in a novel manner to explain what drives different rates of innovation in different
societies.

However, I’ll then show you that social psychology isn’t enough, and an incorporation of other
perspectives can enhance our understanding of innovation. Specifically, politics and an appreciation
of the role institutions (such as laws) play in incentivising citizens to engage in innovative activities.

What is innovation?

What does innovation mean to you? Is it as significant as Elon Musk and Tesla revolutionising the
way we drive, or as small changing your morning routine to include coffee so you can survive the
day? Well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2022), innovation is ‘the implementation of a
significantly improved product, process, or marketing method…’. Innovations don’t have to be world
changing, they just have to improve on the current product or situation. So, congratulations! You’re
probably an innovator just like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs (although maybe on a slightly smaller
scale).

But just how significant a role does innovation play in our every day lives? Broughel (2019) believe
it’s significant. Having consulted historical records on a variety of factors, they believe that
innovative processes is one of the key drivers of progress. An obvious example is the evolution of
computers (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Power of Innovation

You only have to reach into your pocket to marvel at the power of innovation. The world’s first computer took
up over 1800 square feet, weighted over 25 tonnes and for all that, could only execute 5,000 instructions per
second. Sound like a lot? Well, the iPhone 6 (released way back in 2014) fits in your pocket, weighs 4.5 ounces
and can execute 25 billion instructions per second. While the creation of the first computer is a significant
innovation, computers only changed our world because of continued innovation of the initial invention.
Reference: http://www.techsamay.com/2014/09/apple-iphone-6-specifications-price.html
 How Does Society Influence Innovation?

For social psychologists, innovation isn’t a phenomenon which simply happens. Different societies
innovate at different rates (Chua, 2019) and this occurs because of the nature of the society in
question (Muthukrishna et al., 2016). What exactly determines the rate of innovation is a complex
and evolving question which could never be comprehensively covered in a blog post. So today we’ll
cover a classic case study in social psychology. But, contrary to common scholarly opinion, we’ll
uniquely apply the concept of innovation to it. This example is found in Tasmania (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The History of Tasmania

Today, Tasmania is an island off the south coast of Australia which has the cleanest air in the world. However,
this wasn’t always the case (the island part, at least). Until the end of the last Ice Age, Tasmania was
connected to mainland Australia. When the ice caps melted and sea levels rose, Tasmania and its inhabitants
became cut off from rest of the country. This has a profound effect on the destiny of the population and acts as
an interesting natural experiment on the effect of population size on innovation.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians

The case Tasmania tells us a lot about the influence population has on innovation. But to understand
why, we first need to appreciate that the effective population of Tasmania reduced after it was cut
off from the mainland, even if the number of people living there remained the same. After Tasmania
was isolated from the rest of Australia, residents were no longer able to mingle with individuals on
the mainland they were once connected to. This reduced the number of people that residents of
Tasmania could observe and learn from, even if the number of people living in Tasmania remained
the same. This led to a loss of technology, namely a reduction in diversity of tools (Figure 3), on
Tasmania after it became isolated Henrich (2004).

However, can we also think about this loss of technology in terms of a slowing of innovation?
Indeed, would a society lose technology if it was continually improving it? Richerson et al. (2009)
claim that ‘small, isolated societies will have less innovation’. A useful way to think about the
relevance of population size in relation to this is like a lottery. The more tickets you buy, the more
likely you are to win. The larger the population, not only are they more likely you’ll be able to retain
current information, but also produce more innovators who produce new innovations (Latzer et al.,
2019). As such, if we frame the Tasmania case as a lack of new innovations, could this provide
evidence that smaller populations innovate less?
Figure 3: Loss of technology in Tasmania

After Tasmania’s isolation, the island’s residents lost technology compared to the mainland. The top photo shows the
tools available on mainland Australia after Tasmania had been isolated for a few hundred years, and the bottom
shows the tools on Tasmania after the same period. Given both areas started from the same level of technology, this
evidence suggests that the reduction in the size of Tasmania’s effective population is a key factor in the loss of skills.
While most scholars attribute this to a lack of learners, could it also be due to less innovation?

Reference: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/stone-age-spear.html

Is it Just About Population Size?

It isn’t just the size of a population which determines the number of innovations which occur. In the
same way that a larger population increases the chances of successful innovations, so does a more
diverse one. Deckert et al. (2022) use a lot of (complicated!) economic models to show that there is
a positive relationship between the rate of innovation and the cultural diversity a society tolerates.

But how can we understand cultural diversity? Uz (2015) used data from 68 countries on the
tendency of individuals to punish ‘norm-violating’ (deviation from what’s expected) behaviour.
Gelfand et al. (2006) implicitly use this characterisation to show that innovation is greater in
countries which tolerate greater behavioural deviation.

What’s Social Psychology Missing?

You may be wondering where the flaw is in psychology’s understanding? Well, I’m not here to tell
you that social psychology is wrong. Instead, I’d encourage you to consider whether political
institutions can influence processes which lead to innovation which aren’t explicitly considered by
social psychologists.
A formal institution can be thought of as parts of a government, such as constitutions and laws.
Conversely, informal institutions are traditions and customs which can themselves be shaped by
formal institutions (Palomino, 2021). Both can encourage or stifle innovation.

For example, after the fall of the Berlin Wall (figure 4), Fritsch et al (2014) demonstrated that even
when East Germany was reintegrated into the West, it still took 15 years for levels of
entrepreneurship to be comparable to that in West Germany. They argue that this was because the
repressive socialist state (and its formal institutions) which existed in East Germany during the Cold
War changed the informal institutions which defined the culture of East Germans (Wegener, 2019).
As a result, they became more isolated (the effective population became smaller) and more
conformist than their western peers (Deter, 2021). This meant that even when the repressive formal
institution was removed, its dampening of innovation persisted.

We can only achieve such insights by considering political context alongside the psychological study
of social processes.

Figure 4: The importance of informal institutions shown after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Even when East Germans faced the same institutional conditions as the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
experience of living under a more repressive state stunted innovation amongst that population for over a decade.

Reference: https://warriorgirl3.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/the-berlin-walls-great-human-experiment-ideas-the-
boston-globe/

Key takeaways

The goal of this blog is twofold. Firstly, I hope it taught you about the importance of innovation and
how we can understand what causes it. However, more importantly, I hope this blog teaches you
about the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Each subject has its merits
and flaws, so when we are tacking complex real-world issues, a breadth of approaches is crucial. If
not, we’ll all be far less effective at understanding and solving issues.
Further Readings:

Another explanation of what innovation is… in case you want to dive deeper! :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michellegreenwald/2014/03/12/what-exactly-is-
innovation/?sh=21ebb9205e5a

A list of innovations you didn’t know you needed! : https://www.wipo.int/ip-

outreach/en/ipday/2017/ten_innovations.html

What is cultural tightness and looseness… from a professor! : https://behavioralscientist.org/tight-

and-loose-cultures-a-conversation-with-michele-gelfand/

Further Viewing:

TED Talks about innovation : https://www.ted.com/topics/innovation

Bibliography

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