the human social operating system

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Insights from 30 years of AI research in CX and EX: twenty universal principles of human interaction

As chief data scientist in a company of EX and CX measurement services, I have always been blessed with data that is at the heart of human interaction, across all cultures and continents. Due to the confidentiality of this internal data, it was not possible to conduct academic scientific research on it. Instead, since 1990 we had our own AI lab. Fortunately, one of the strengths of AI is that it can be measured against reality. So, it has always been possible to prove that a process or an algorithm performs, even if you do not yet know why.

Thus, more than 30 years of analyzing human behavior data using AI techniques has produced a body of basic rules. These rules stand out because they are repeatedly confirmed, so they appear to be universally valid. We call them the Human Social Operating System, and they refer to the relation and interaction between individuals and their social environment.They also hold true across languages and cultures. Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans – they have few differences, but many similarities.

The Human Social Operating System (HSOS)
anchors human interaction across six dimensions (-> below)

Using the 80 measures that account for 85% of behavioral variance in human collective relationships.

Mapping the few that steer, and improving the many that matter — for individual navigation and collective improvement.

Collection of ’20 Theses’

When we started to use AI for the analysis of CX and EX in the early 90s, it was because we were unhappy with statistics. What we found was a way of an ‘alien’ intelligence looking at us and our human behavior. This distance showed to be a value of its own. Only later we learned that as important was our own distance towards AI, to be able to take a stake in every question. Extending our CX and EX activities across the globe, over the years this distant intelligence showed us patterns that were repeatitive across cultures. These patterns have been condensed into ’20 theses’.

These ’20 theses’ function as evidence-based checkpoints: they highlight what we found in 30 years, what consistently matters across diverse contexts.
Beyond description, the theses can serve as guidelines for action – how to design feedback systems, anchor-point models, touchpoint journeys or social navigation tools that are robust and sustainable.
Each thesis shows how individual perception and collective wellbeing intersect, offering a lens to harmonize both dimensions.
Last but not least they may serve as a framework for AI systems which support the social organization. For the AI not to create moves or ideas that are not compatible with human reality.
The theses are not rigid laws but adaptive hypotheses – they remind us that anchor points and attention economies evolve, and so must our models.

  • 1 – Social Nature

    Humans are social first, individual second. We live in groups, yet need autonomy to grow.

  • 1.1 – Clustered Individuality

    Humans are not fully predictable, but they cluster. While each person behaves uniquely, they share behavioral profiles with many others who behave very similarly.

  • 1.2 – The 85/15 Rule

    Human behavior is approximately 85% socially determined and 15% individually driven. About 85% of actions conform to recognizable social regularities, while the remaining 15% reflect complex, idiosyncratic personal processes. A limited set of roughly 80 critical variables can account for collective perception, coordination, and response across groups of any scale.

  • 1.3 – Need for Distance

    Belonging gives strength, but distance builds skills. Humans need distance from others (call it autonomy). Distance is just as important as the sense of belonging. Distance builds skills that make the individual useful to the community and strengthen it.

  • 2.1 – Weak Memory Fidelity

    Humans distinguish situations accurately in the moment but retain only simplified or distorted memory traces. We are skilled at focusing and perceiving nuance, yet unable to preserve the full experience. Each situation leaves only a faint cognitive imprint that gradually fades over time.

  • 2.2 – Prison of Perception

    Individuals perceive only partial, filtered versions of reality—shaped by attention, interests, and bias. Perception captures only a limited slice of reality determined by active senses, then further filtered for internal consistency and relevance. The resulting construct is accepted as truth, with little awareness that others may perceive the same situation entirely differently.

  • 2.3 – Stories as Memory Frames

    Humans store facts in a contextual frame. The typical context is the story. For looking back, the story is the main level of memory, and details are coerced or neglected for everything to fit. In looking at the past, everything needs to make sense as part of a story.

  • 2.4 – Happiness = Color

    Happiness is not a goal but the emotional hue of one’s unfolding life story. It emerges from coherence between one’s actions, values, and memories,not from isolated moments of pleasure. It colors the narrative we tell ourselves about who we are and how we live.

  • 3 – Growth & Development

    The driving force of life is growth — not comfort, not satisfaction, not health, but progress through challenge.

  • 3.1 – Craving for Meaningful Story Arcs

    It is not eternal sunshine or endless leisure that humans truly seek. We are not made for constant ease. Fulfillment arises from stories that contain movement and change — highs, lows, and the growth that comes through challenge. Without contrast there is no depth; without struggle, no real sense of meaning.

  • 3.2 – Satisfaction is transient

    Human behavior is better explained by the drive for personal growth than by the pursuit of comfort or satisfaction. Satisfaction is transient — a short-term state that fades once achieved—whereas growth accounts for sustained motivation and long-term patterns of behavior.

  • 3.3 – Conditions for Growth

    The growth conditions for humans resemble those of other species. External influences include opportunities and risks, relationships, and the ability to navigate social environments. Social interaction is the dominant factor — it is largely what occurs between people that shapes the perceived quality of life.

  • 3.4 – Well-Being as Balance

    Well-being is an individual goal for everyone. It is the pursuit of a balance of conditions that is the prerequisite for one’s own prosperity. Prosperity stands for personal and economic growth. Well-being means balancing conditions that allow prosperity.

  • 3.5 – Beauty of Imperfection

    Humans are motivated by progress, not perfection. Across the long history of efforts to eliminate “flaws” in social, organizational, or customer relations, one truth remains: it is the ongoing process of growth and refinement that engages us emotionally — not the illusion of perfection.

  • 4.1 – Conflict as Structure

    Conflicts and their resolutions reveal what a community truly values. Moments of tension expose the underlying structure of social interaction, while the way disputes are resolved defines the degree of cohesion and trust within the group. From the individual’s perspective, how a community handles conflict expresses its deepest principles and character.

  • 4.2 – Levels of Relationships

    Different relationships bring different forms of conflict, expectation, and interpretation—from family to colleagues, clients, and strangers. To understand or design for behavior, we must read it through this relational layer rather than treating it as a single, uniform expression of “human nature.” Context defines meaning, and relationships give behavior its shape.

  • 4.3 – 80 Social Sensor Points

    In individual perception, a small number of critical conflict points — here termed social sensor points — largely determine how a person interprets and responds to situations. The collective diversity of human perception can be explained to roughly 85% by a data set of about 80 variables that represent the full spectrum of social dynamics.

  • 5.1 – Drive for Consistency

    Humans have a deep need for consistency — it is a fundamental aspect of behavior. A person’s attitude or action in one area often allows reliable inferences about their stance in others. This same drive for coherence makes sustained deception difficult: lying requires constant cognitive effort to maintain contradictions and is therefore usually avoided.

  • 5.2 – Information Optimum

    In social interaction and communication, there is an information optimum. All relevant – impactful – information has a level of usefulness that clarifies an overall picture – and a level of confusion that can be considered noise. Noise is the part of information without contextual contribution that may nevertheless cause a mistaken reaction.

  • 5.3 – Rule of 8–12

    The human information optimum lies between 8 and 12 discernible details, regardless of how much additional data is available. This range appears to be consistent across cultures, much like the universality of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which provides a comparable framework for understanding shared patterns in human motivation.

  • 6 – Place & Prosperity

    Where we are shapes who we are and, largely, who we can become. Every place carries its own mix of values, rhythms, and expectations that influence identity and aspiration. Environments are not neutral backdrops — they act as silent teachers, offering cues for what is possible and desirable. The prosperity values embedded in a place