The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

     Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity.

     You've probably seen this effect—perhaps you are a victim of it. You feel alienated from mainstream culture and want to make a statement that you are not part of it. You think about wearing different clothes, experimenting with a new hairstyle, or even trying unconventional makeup and grooming products. And yet when you finally reveal your new look to the world, it turns out you are not alone—millions of others have made exactly the same choices. Indeed, you all look more or less identical, the exact opposite of the countercultural statement you wanted to achieve.

     This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences.

     How does this kind of synchronization occur? Is it inevitable in modern society, and are there ways for people to be genuinely different from the masses?

    Today we get some answers thanks to the work of Jonathan Touboul at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Touboul is a mathematician who studies the way the transmission of information through society influences the behavior of people within it. He focuses in particular on a society composed of conformists who copy the majority and anticonformists, or hipsters, who do the opposite.

     And his conclusion is that in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. In other words, the hipster effect is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people.

Question 2. Answer the following questions in your words.

1. What do people often do to show they don´t follow trends?
2. Why do they fail in trying to look different?
3. What is the ' hipster effect ' ?
4. What does Jonathan Toubul study?

Question 3. Find words or phrases in the text that correspond to the words and definitions given.

1. most usual (p.1)
2. distant (p.2)
3. obtain (p.2)
4. series (p.6)
5. experience (p.6)
6. result (p.6)

KEY

Question 2.

1. They change the way they dress, their hairdo and use peculiar toiletries and cosmetics.
2. They eventually discover that there are a lot more people who don't accept conventions either and choose looks that are similar to theirs.
3. It is the fact that all those who do not like to look like the rest in the end adopt the same kind of styles and become another mainstream group.
4. He studies how our conduct, as members of society, is affected by the way news and information spread within society itself.

Question 3.

1. mainstream
2. alienated
3. achieve / to achieve
4. range
5. undergoes / to undergo
6. outcome