Flirting with social enterprise

On my writing agenda today is a bit about social enterprise as a mimetic phenomenon--less a self-conscious movement than adaptive imitation. By a nifty coincidence, my breaktime reading brought this pertinent article in the New York Times on flirting.

Flirting? How in the world is that relevant?

Here are a few key paragraphs that reflect that scholarship I've been reading--

Most people are also strongly sensitive to rapport, to charm, to the social music in the person making the pitch. In recent years, researchers have begun to decode the unspoken, subtle elements that come into play when people click.

They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

By understanding exactly how this process works, researchers say, people can better catch themselves when falling for an artful pitch, and even sharpen their own social skills in ways they may not have tried before.

“Really good salespeople, and for that matter good con artists, have known about these skills and used them forever,” Jeremy Bailenson, a psychologist at Stanford, said. “All we’re doing now is measuring and describing more precisely what it is they’re doing, whether consciously or not.”

And while we're at it, let's throw in a bit of this . . .

One reason subtle mimicry is so instantly beguiling may be that it draws on and, perhaps, activates brain circuits involved in feelings of empathy.

In several studies, Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has shown that some of the same brain regions that are active when a person feels pain also flare up when that person imagines someone else like a loved one feeling the same sting or ache.

A similar process almost certainly occurs when a person takes pleasure in the good fortune of a friend or the apparent enjoyment of a conversation partner, Dr. Decety said.

“When you’re being mimicked in a good way, it communicates a kind of pleasure, a social high you’re getting from the other person, and I suspect it activates the areas of the brain involved in sensing reward,” he said.

And I think you see the connection. The nonprofit world--and the do-gooder world generally--curries favor by taking on the characteristics of its potential supporters.

Step outside the moment and look at our past few decades of history-- not like you're part of a social revolution but a collector wandering through a flea market (a major preoccupation of my childhood, actually. Pretty soon the patterns will emerge. Welfare state and market failure in the 1970s; democracy and free markets with the collapse the Soviet Union; venture philanthropy in the dot-com boom. Each new identity proclaimed itself the millennial summum bonum, and each one gave way to a newer identity in keeping with the latest trends.

Does this mean that social enterprise is just an echo chamber? No, not completely. But it does give us reason to pause. If the concept is going to have a sustained measurable impact (!), it has to go beyond parroting the latest lingo about capital markets and ROI.