the human social operating system

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Social Navigation & Growth

The Social Data Body

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

    Humans are 85% social beings and 15% individuals. About 85% of behavior follows predictable social rules. The other 15% is complex, deeply personal, and unique. A small number of critical data points (approx. 80) explain collective perception and response across any size of groups. .

  • 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 differentiate situations well in the moment, but retain only simplified or distorted memory images. Humans are good at focusing and differentiating situations, but they cannot store them. Only a faint memory image remains of each situation, and it fades more and more over time.

  • 2.2 – Prison of Perception

    Individuals perceive only partial, filtered versions of reality—colored by interests and biases—yet often treat these as absolute truth. Humans are victims of their perception. That is, the individual perceives only a portion of “reality” that corresponds to his or her currently active sense organs. This perception is further filtered by consistency and colored by interests.

  • 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 — it is the emotional tint of one’s life story.

  • 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 and vacations that humans crave, they don’t want endless ease. Fulfillment comes not from stability, but from engaging stories that include highs, lows, and growth through overcoming challenges.

  • 3.2 – Growth over Satisfaction

    Human behavior is more consistently explained by the drive for personal growth than by the pursuit of health or satisfaction. Satisfaction is temporary and it is only an explanation for a moment. Growth explains long-term motivation and behavior.

  • 3.3 – Conditions for Growth

    Growth conditions for humans resemble those of other species. External conditions are often: opportunities and risks, relationships and social navigation. Social interaction is the dominant factor. It is largely what happens between people that creates the impression of the 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 inspired by progress, not perfection. Learning systems depend on variation and error to improve. Looking at the entire history of attempts to eliminate “flaws” in social (employee and customer) relations, it becomes clear that it is the process of improvement that is emotionally captivating, not perfection.

  • 4.1 – Conflict as Structure

    Conflicts and their solutions reveal what a community stands for. Its resolution defines communal cohesion. The structure of social interaction in a community of people is often perceived at points of conflict. Conflicts and their resolution are what a community stands for from the point of view of individuals.

  • 4.2 – Levels of Relationships

    Different relationships bring different conflicts and expectations — from family to strangers. We must read (and design for) behavior through the relationship layer, not as generic “human nature.”

  • 4.3 – 80 Social Sensor Points

    In an individual’s perception, only a handful of critical conflict points, here referred to as “social sensor points,” largely explain the individual’s perception and reaction. The entire diversity of a human collective view can be explained to 85% with a data set representing 80 data points across the entire social diversity.

  • 5.1 – Drive for Consistency

    Humans seek consistency. This is an inescapable basic human behavior. It means that a person’s attitude or behavior on one issue can be used to infer other issues. It also means that under “normal” circumstances it is very difficult to lie and deceive consistently. It takes a lot of energy and is therefore easily 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 has a value of between 8 and 12 measureable details, independent of the number of detailed data available. This range is consistent across cultures, in the same sense as the Maslow pyramid of desires can be a comparable measure across all human cultures.

  • 6 – Place & Prosperity

    Where we are shapes who we are, and largely, who we can become. Places carry prosperity values that attract and inspire.