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Normcore was more conceptual art
: See Richard Benson, “Normcore: How a Spoof Marketing Term Grew into a Fashion Phenomenon,”
Guardian
, Dec. 17, 2014.

“If obedience to fashion”
: Simmel, “Fashion,” 549.

“this might help explain”
: See Richard Wilk, “Loving People, Hating What They Eat: Marginal Foods and Social Boundaries,” in
Reimagining Marginalized Foods: Global Processes, Local Places
, ed. Elizabeth Finnis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 17.

“is saying someone hasn't got it”
: Mullan raised this point during a discussion of taste on the BBC program
In Our Time
,
http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​programmes/​b0082dzm
.

“Most movements in art”
: E. H. Gombrich,
News and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance
(London: Phaidon Press, 1966), 88.

What our tastes “say about us”
: At least one study has proposed that mimicking a previously disliked person led to no increase in liking for that person; mimicking someone
already liked
, however, led to more liking of that person. See Mariëlle Stel et al., “Mimicking Disliked Others: Effects of
A Priori
Liking on the Mimicking-Liking Link,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
40, no. 5 (2010): 867–80.

“counter-imitate”
: The concept and the word come from Gabriel Tarde, but I was pointed to it by Djellal and Gallouj in their paper, “Laws of Imitation and Invention.”

When someone knows
: This formulation is laid out in Herbert Hamilton, “Dimensions of Self-Designated Opinion Leadership and Their Correlates,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
35, no. 2 (1971): 266–74.

This conquered the language
: For a good account, see Britt Peterson, “Linguists Are Like, ‘Get Used to It!,' ”
Boston Globe
, Jan. 25, 2015.

“poverty and degradation”
: Daniel Luzer, “How Lobster Got Fancy,”
Pacific Standard
, June 7, 2013.

Then there is the nettlesome problem
: Marjorie Perloff makes this point in a
good essay on taste, inspired by Raymond Williams's famous
Keywords
text. See Perloff, “Taste,”
English Studies in Canada
3, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 50–55.

Groups “transmit” tastes
: In a famous study the psychologist Henri Tajfel conducted in the 1970s, a group of schoolboys was asked about their preferences for a series of abstract, unlabeled paintings by two “foreign painters.” The boys were then grouped as “Klee” or “Kandinsky” fans. There was a catch, however. The groups they were placed into had nothing to do with the paintings they actually preferred. But here they were, lumped together as Klee or Kandinsky fans and now asked to distribute a certain number of “points”—a standard exercise in psychology—between the two groups, in ways that could benefit their own group or stress overall equity. What happened? The Klee subjects consistently gave more “points” to their own group—even when they could have thrown some points to the Kandinsky camp without hurting their own profits. Tajfel, who called this the “minimal group paradigm,” was trying to show how “out group” discrimination and “in-group” favoritism could blossom under the flimsiest of pretexts. What could be more flimsy, Tajfel noted, than invented preferences toward “artists they had never heard of”? See Tajfel et al., “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
1, no. 2 (1971): 149–78.

Small, seemingly trivial
: The sociologist Michael Macy and colleagues note: “When reverberated through the ‘echo chamber' of interaction with similar alters, even very small within-individual biases can serve as coordinating mechanisms that catalyze network autocorrelation in large populations. A similar coordinating role can be played by opinion leaders with broad influence, even if this influence is far weaker than that of peers. It takes only a very small ‘nudge,' whether from ‘within' or ‘above,' to tip a large population into a self-reinforcing dynamic that can carve deep cultural fissures into the demographic landscape.” See Daniel DellaPosta, Yongren Shi, and Michael Macy, “Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?”
American Journal of Sociology
120, no. 5 (March 2015): 1473–1511.

He conforms to the group
: As one group of researchers notes, “Conformity has the interesting theoretical property that it reduces behavioral variation within population while potentially increasing variation among populations.” See C. Efferson et al., “Conformists and Mavericks: The Empirics of Frequency-Dependent Cultural Transmission,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
29, no. 1 (2008): 56–64.

“loud and distinctive”
: See Bruce E. Byers, Kara L. Belinsky, and R. Alexander Bentley, “Independent Cultural Evolution of Two Song Traditions in the Chestnut-Sided Warbler,”
American Naturalist
176, no. 4 (Oct. 2010).

In the fashion of
: As R. F. Lachlan and colleagues notes, it is likely that “every individual learns a cultural trait slightly inaccurately, but only the cumulative effect of many such inaccurate learning events leads to the generation of a trait that is perceived as different from the original.” Lachlan et al., “The Evolution of Conformity-Enforcing Behaviour in Cultural Communication Systems,”
Animal Behavior
68 (2004): 561–70.

The songs that disappear first
: “When they are rare, and copying is random,” Byers told me, “the rarest thing is mostly likely to disappear.” This makes sense, but he stressed we should not underestimate the randomness of it: “If just by chance in one generation only eight birds copy it, instead of ten, then
next, just by chance, six birds, suddenly it is now rare, subject to extinction by chance.”

Memes that thrive
: This is not the whole story, of course. One study of Twitter hashtag adoption found that a hashtag that was more frequently retweeted early on ended up being eclipsed by a rival hashtag, which seemed to pull ahead on the strength of “replies” on Twitter, signaling not only some kind of deeper engagement but some sense among users that the initially faster-rising tweet was perhaps a bit faddish. See Yu-Ru Lin et al., “#Bigbirds Never Die: Understanding Social Dynamics of Emergent Hashtags,”
arXiv
, 1301.7144.v1, March 28, 2013. With bird memes, there are also particular characteristics, beyond exposure and frequency, that seem to promulgate success (like “longer duration, great amplitude modulation and higher mean frequency”). See, for example, Myron Baker and David Gammon, “Vocal Memes in Natural Populations of Chickadees: Why Do Some Memes Persist and Others Go Extinct?,”
Animal Behaviour
75, no. 1 (2008): 279–89.

“The more frequent a verb”
: This example comes from Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel's fascinating book,
Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture
(New York: Riverhead, 2013), 36.

“Thrived” thrived because people
: And, they note, because of a remarkable Proto-Germanic invention, the “-ed” suffix, circa 500–250
B.C
.

Music is filled with moments
: For an interesting argument about the role of “accidents” in pop music, see Charles Kronengold, “Accidents, Hooks, Theory,”
Popular Music
24, no. 3 (2005): 381–97.

And so in a couple of decades
: For an interesting account of Goree Carter and the recording of “Rock Awhile” (which the rock historian Robert Palmer cites as the first rock-and-roll song—not Ike Turner's “Rocket 88”—with distorted guitars a key criteria), see John Nova Lomax, “Roll Over, Ike Turner,”
Texas Monthly
, Dec. 2014. For a good timeline of key moments in guitar distortion, see Dave Hunter, “Who Called the Fuzz? Early Milestones in Distorted Guitars,” accessed via the Web site of the guitar manufacturer Gibson:
http://​www2.​gibson.​com/​News-​Lifestyle/​Features/​en-​us/​who-​called-​the-​fuzz-​714.​aspx
.

“complete accident”
: See Jann Wenner, “Pete Townshend Talks Mods, Recording, and Smashing Guitars,”
Rolling Stone
, Sept. 14, 1968.

“To discover something”
: Pierre Bourdieu,
Sociology in Question
(New York: Sage, 1993), 109.

“predicted that the vast majority”
: J. Stephen Lansing and Murray P. Cox, “The Domain of the Replicators,”
Current Anthropology
52, no. 1 (Feb. 2011): 105–25.

This was what R. Alexander Bentley
: Harold Herzog, R. Alexander Bentley, and Matthew Hahn, “Random Drift and Large Shifts in Popularity of Dog Breeds,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
, Aug. 7, 2004, 353–56.

A study that looked at positive breed
: See Stefano Ghirlanda et al., “Fashion vs. Function in Cultural Evolution: The Case of Dog Breed Popularity,”
PLoS ONE
8, no. 9 (2013): 1–6.

Harold Herzog, a co-author of Bentley's
: Harold Herzog, “Forty-Two Thousand and One Dalmatians: Fads, Social Contagion, and Dog Breed Popularity,”
Society and Animals
14, no. 4 (2006): 383–97.

The bigger the box office
: See Stefano Ghirlanda, Alberto Acerbi, and Harold
Herzog, “Dog Movie Stars and Dog Breed Popularity: A Case Study in Media Influence on Choice,”
PLoS ONE
9, no. 9 (2014). Note the authors, “These data suggest that movies featuring dogs tend to use breeds whose popularity had been increasing for some time.”

“fabulous rise in poodle popularity”
: See “Fads: The Poodle Dethroned,”
Time
, Feb. 23, 1962.

“rogue waves”
: I wrote about this in “When Good Waves Go Rogue,”
Nautilus
, July 31, 2014. As with fashion trends, certain places are particularly suited for the formation of rogue waves, but there is essentially no way to predict the emergence of the wave itself.

“It costs no more”
: See Stanley Lieberson's landmark book,
A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 25.

One statistical analysis
: Jonah Berger et al., “From Karen to Katie: Using Baby Names to Understand Cultural Evolution,”
Psychological Science
, Oct. 2012, 1067–73.

A study of naming patterns
: Ibid.

This is not so different
: See Alan T. Sorenson, “Bestseller Lists and Product Variety,”
Journal of Industrial Economics
55, no. 4 (Dec. 2007): 738.

“the qualities inherent”
: See H. Leibenstein, “Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
64, no. 2 (May 1950): 183–207. Leibenstein refers to three phenomena of “nonadditive demand”: The “bandwagon effect,” in which demand goes up for something that other people are consuming; the “snob effect,” by which demand goes down for something that other people are consuming; and the “Veblen effect,” after Thorstein Veblen, in which consumer demand is increased because a good has a higher price.

As one study showed
: See Marianne Bertrand and Senhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination” (NBER, working paper 9873, July 2003). The researchers note that while names can reflect social background as well as race (“African American babies named Kenya or Jamal are affiliated with much higher mothers' education than African American babies named Latonya or Leroy”), they did not find that this actually affected callbacks: “In summary, this test suggests little evidence that social background drives the extent of discrimination.”

another analysis found
: See Petra Moser, “Taste-Based Discrimination: Empirical Evidence from a Shock to Preferences During WWI” (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, discussion paper 08-019, 2009).

Names that appear to be neutrally
: This example comes from Lansing and Cox, “Domain of the Replicators.”

Hit songs, meanwhile
: See “A World of Hits,”
Economist
, Nov. 26, 2009. As the magazine notes, “A recent analysis by
Billboard
, a trade magazine, found a similar trend in America. There, sales had declined across the board, but the hits were holding up best. Albums ranked between 300 and 400 suffered the greatest proportionate losses.” As
Billboard
noted of the skew between the top-performing tracks and those out on the long tail, “In any given week, the top 200 digital tracks account for nearly one in four track purchases. To put that in context, Amazon.​com's
MP3 store currently lists 9.99 million tracks. So, the top 200 tracks represent only 0.002% of what a large download store stocks.” Glenn Peoples, “Tracking the Hits Along the Musical Long Tail,”
Billboard
, May 11, 2009.

The curving long tail chart
: Anita Elberse notes that in the wake of the transition to digital music the long tail has gotten longer and flatter: “Although today's hits may no longer reach the sales volumes typical of the pre-piracy era, an ever smaller set of top titles continues to account for a large chunk of the overall demand for music.” Elberse, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?,”
Harvard Business Review
, July 2008.

“lesser known alternative”
: William McPhee,
Formal Theories of Mass Behavior
(New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 136.

Through sheer statistical distribution
: McPhee's theory was supported by the findings of a study by the marketing professor Anita Elberse, who examined behavior at online music and movie sites: “Even for consumers who regularly choose the most obscure products, hit products typically constitute the lion's share of their choices.” See Elberse, “A Taste for Obscurity: An Individual-Level Examination of ‘Long Tail' Consumption” (Harvard Business School, working paper 08-008, Aug. 2007). For an analysis of the principle applied to consumer brands, see also Andrew Ehrenberg and Gerald Goodhardt, “Double Jeopardy Revisited, Again,”
Marketing Research
(Spring 2002): 40–42. Other research has suggested that “long tail” consumption is not driven by people who overwhelmingly seek out the obscure; rather, “everyone is a bit eccentric,” choosing “niche products at least some of the time.” For example, some 85 percent of Netflix users have “ventured into the tail.” See Sharad Goel et al., “Anatomy of the Long Tail: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Tastes,”
WSDM'10
, Feb. 4–6, 2010.