Christmas Thinking at Twilight, Wednesday 11 December 2019

Members were invited to take a break from the pre-Christmas rush, enjoy the calm of the UUSC, mingle with fellow alumni and hear from economist and Cambridge alum Professor Michelle Baddeley on 'Copycats & Contrarians'. Michelle Baddeley has recently started new roles as the Associate Dean - Research and Professor in Economics at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. She is also an Honorary Professor with the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. She was Director of Studies (Economics), Fellow and Tutor/Admissions Tutor at Gonville & Caius College 1995-2013, affiliated with the Faculty of Economics. She has an MPhil and PhD in Economics from University of Cambridge, and a BA and BEcon from the University of Queensland. Michelle gave insights from her recent book, Copycats & Contrarians - Why We Follow Others, and When We Don't (Yale University Press) - a multidisciplinary exploration of our human inclination to herd, exploring why our instinct to copy others can be dangerous in today’s interlinked world. Rioting teenagers, tumbling stock markets, political ructions and the spread of religious terrorism appear to have little in common, but all are driven by the same basic instincts: the tendency to herd, conform and imitate others. We learnt copycats and contrarians can be symbiotic and neither type is invariably good or bad!