What 6,000 communities taught me about human behaviour - and what marketers can learn from them

CommunityCommunity GlossaryCommunity StrategyCommunity TheoryCommunity Based MarketingCommunity Led GrowthCommunity ManagementModerationWellbeingCase StudyCommunity of Purpose

5 May

Written By Michelle Goodall

At Brighton SEO 2026 I shared something I've been building up over years of working at the intersection of community and marketing: the conviction that if you want to understand how people behave online, how they make decisions, and how brands can genuinely connect with them, you need to start by understanding communities.

Not communities as a tactic. Communities as a lens on human behaviour.

I worked out that buulding communities for 30+ has given me access to:

6,000+ communities
6.57 billion conversations analysed
10.08 billion data points

That’s not a small dataset.

It has powered my understanding of how and why people behave and communicate the way that they do.

1 - Thankfully, we are not homogenous

People are individuals - design for difference, not for the average

The first and possibly the most important lesson: people behave very differently from one another. And communities reveal this in sharp relief.

I showed that by using frameworks like DISC, 16 Personalities and Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, we can begin to map the range of personalities, communication styles, and intelligence strengths in any given group.

Whether you're building a brand community or planning a campaign, designing for a single imagined "average" person means you're probably missing most of your audience.

The best communities (and the best marketing strategies), are designed ‘hetrogeneously’. They account for a full spectrum of people, not just the loudest ones, or people who are most like ourselves.

2 - Our brains are designed to take shortcuts

Cognitive biases can shape a community and our marketing strategu

Our brains use shortcuts to conserve energy, and those shortcuts are called cognitive biases. The play out constantly in life and in community behaviour.

As marketers, understanding them helps us to design smarter experiences and avoid the traps. I picked a handful to illustrate some common biases and talked about how I adapt community design and marketing strategies to them.

Primacy effect

First impressions dominate. Your member onboarding experience and member welcome matter more than almost anything else.

IKEA effect

People highly value the things that they help create. Co-creation drives loyalty and engagement. Design ways to let the members shape the community.

Hanlon's Razor

Bad behaviour in your community? Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by a lack of knowledge. Assume good faith first.

Negative social proof

Highlighting bad behaviour can have the opposite effect and can even normalise it. Use injunctive norms (what we value) over descriptive ones (what people do) and choose language and numbers carefully if you want to encourage specific behaviours.

Pratfall effect

Small mistakes humanise. The occasional typo or wobble in a webinar makes your brand more relatable, not less. But don’t go all out to make mistakes. And definitely don’t do anything to cause a reputational issue/crisis.

Extrinsic Incentive Bias

This cognitive bias can be explained as “They are doing this for the money/power/status”
“I’m in this for the experience”, but it’s rarely as simple as this in any community.

Most of us have a cognitive tendency to overemphasise the power of external rewards (awards, money, recognition) on others' actions while believing oneself is driven by intrinsic motivation (altruism, passion, purpose).

In community strategy, we design reward systems to work for people who have different levels of intrinsic and extrinsic human motivators. For example:

Intrinsic - volunteering, social impact challenges, becoming a buddy/mentoring.
Extrinsic - awards, badges, status, financial rewards.

3 - We are a ‘we’ species

Herd mentality: why mass behaviour is social, not individual

Mark Earls' book Herd argues that most marketing fails because it targets individuals when humans are fundamentally social creatures. We have mirror neurons specifically designed to process the actions of others. We copy. We follow. We move in groups.

There has been a lot written by much smarter people than me, such as Mark, about how we rarely act or buy as a ‘solo sport’. I reminded the audience of this quote from Rory Sutherland that has stayed with me for years.

"The only thing we ever truly buy totally alone is haemorrhoid cream." Rory Sutherland

This has direct implications for community and for campaigns trying to shift behaviour at scale. Word-of-mouth and peer influence consistently outperform direct persuasion.

If you want to change mass behaviour, you need to understand and work with social dynamics, not against them. In communities, this means creating the conditions for visible, shareable participation. And being watchful for moments where group consensus can crowd out individual voices.

I could have spent the whole presentation exploring this topic alone.

I love thinking about us humans as ‘super apes’, wired to mirror and follow the group most of the time. Social proof is powerful, especially as a driver for creating positive impact in communities and driving action/purchase. But groupthink can also have a negative side.

To counteract this, design spaces, opportunities and experiences for individualism and offer ways for people to safely challenge ‘the herd’.

4 - The human in the age of AI

Aspirational humanity and the value of the authentic

As AI generates more and more of our content, culture, and communication, something unexpected is happening: genuine human creativity, imperfection, and emotion are becoming more desirable, not less.

This is ‘aspirational humanity’.

Communities are uniquely positioned to deliver this.

They are spaces where real people connect, argue, go through all the emotions, support one another, co-create and share lived experiences that no algorithm would generate.

For marketers, this is a significant opportunity. Authenticity, craft, and genuine human experience will command a premium in a world of optimised, AI-flattened content.

5 - Ritual and belonging

The power of repeated, shared behaviour

Rituals are one of the most underused tools in community building and in brand strategy.

Rituals don't have to be religious or complex. They should be simple expected, repeated patterns of behaviour that create psychological safety, reinforce group identity, and bond people together over time.

In the communities I design, I build rituals in from the start: the weekly roundup, the monthly member spotlight, the new member orientation, language designed to connect and not exclude.

Over time, communities often develop their own rituals organically. Predictable, meaningful moments of connection deepen loyalty.

I’ve written more about rituals in communities here: What are rituals in community building, and why are they so important?

6 - A note of realism

Life gets in the way, and that's okay

Here's something community builders don't talk about enough: low engagement is not always a signal of failure.

Sometimes your most active community member disappears because a parent or their child needs care. Sometimes the person who always kickstarts a conversation is going through a tough time at work or in a relationship.

In B2B communities and communities of practice, engagement often goes through the floor over summer, the festive season and national holidays. Life frequently intervenes. As it should.

I talked about another bias - The Spotlight Bias, sometimes called Main Character Syndrome, where we assume that we and our community matters as much to everyone else as it does to us.

Being realistic and respectful about the time and attention that people spend in our communities isn't pessimism. It's good, realistic community management.

7 - Laughter as a form of ‘contagious bonding’

The serious business of fun

Great communities create psychological safety in many ways. But the most powerful communities are where there is space for shared laughter.

Shared language, shared jokes, and a genuine lightness of touch are not peripheral to community health. They are central to it.

Build the rules, the space and the moderation structures that keep communities safe, and then get out of the way and let people be the funny, helpful, kind, curious, generous people they usually are.

By making the point about laughter and swearing being excellent methods of ‘contagious bonding’, I also got the opportunity to display a 4 foot image of one of my Damn Fine Greetings sweary greetings cards on screen. No complaints from anyone. Yet.

In summary

Communities are mega sources of unstructured data and a window on human behaviour. Understanding what motivates human behaviours and designing around those is at the heart of good marketing and good community building.

Here’s my presentation

I’ll share a video when the lovely Brighton SEO people let me.

Sadly there isn't a single cheat code for building communities. But there are some human behaviours that manifest in almost ALL communities.

‘What 6,000 communities can tell ius about human behaviour explores the depths of human motivations and behaviours.

Understanding these will make you a more perceptive, better marketer.

Michelle has helped design, build and scale over 6,000 communities over 3 decades.

She has developed insights about how people behave, what motivates individuals and how we can use this insight to adapt our brands, products, services, marketing and communities for growth and success.

Thank me / Hire me

Are these articles helpful to you?

Please do contact me if you’d like to discuss any aspect of community building or if you want support with your marketing or community strategy. I’m happy to discuss both small and large projects.

Book a Free Consultation

Want help or support with your community strategy or community building? I’m ready and waiting to hear from you. Book an introductory call to speak to me about your challenges and questions you might have.

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Michelle Goodall