Thanks for the excellent commentary. Better than the original post.

For those who don’t know, http://www.justthrive.com is one of a handful of serious disruption plays in the financial services space (recently joined the tree.com family). So someone to listen to. (Matt, I heard Doug speak the other day: http://kevinhoffberg.com/blog/2009/05/05/from-bai-doug-lebda-from-treecom/. Perhaps that’s how you found the post).

Some time after posting this I came across some work done by Melinda Davis called the Human Desire Project: http://origin-www.fastcompany.com/magazine/67/desire.html. Some points there that I think may track your thinking.

In the end, I think that Gary is writing for the crowd and making observations based on apparent behaviors vs. working outwards from what we think we know about behavioral psychology. Many of these behaviors, as you rightly point out, can be explained just as easily, and probably more accurately, if we think about the kind of socialization mechanisms that Cialdini talks about. So what looks like one thing may just be people responding to a desire to be liked or part of something as opposed to some profound shift in our social or genetic wiring that just magically showed up.

I actually think the list improves as it goes on, but perhaps only because (1) is a huge stumbling block for me. I think most people actually do think this, but mistakenly – the amount to which advertising and media exposure actually drives product decisions is still so great that we are nowhere near a level-competition.
For any reasonable product, one that is 50% as good can win if they can throw enough money at marketing, etc. We could say “all is fair in love and war”, but I think that shows exactly how incorrect (1) is. As long as people infer that because something is popular, it must be good and should be used, I don’t think we’ll have this.
(2) is a little iffy, since people evaluate your contribution in light of your credentials. As a behavioral psychologist, we’ve known for a long time that the light in which people receive information changes their reaction, and I don’t think we’ve broken that so easily.
(3) I think may not be true, but it is certainly true that Gen F’s think it is. This is a time where people seem to have immense faith that the stratifications that arise are organic, though this is a mistake that many generations seem to have made.
(4) Hell yes. Which is why I work for Thrive. You serve, you hope others follow suit, and try to push the whole industry/community/world towards an orientation that seeks to actually do right by people. But that is where (1) becomes a problem – sometimes, those leaders don’t get followed because they didn’t pay for a big enough box.
(5) seems to be mostly the same thing as (11), actually, in the following sense: behavioral choices are a product of both internal and external factors, which (5) calls choice vs. assignment. Choice, in that sense, are on the rise…people want to do the right thing because it feels right, not necessarily because it has been logically derived. People want paternalism that is disguised – you never tell people what to do anymore, you “guide” them. Which is a good thing, in my book.