Kate Fox: Behaviour sleuth

If you spot a woman following you around the shops, there's a good chance Kate Fox is on your tail. Peter Stanford meets an academic turned detective

Fox, a trendspotter with a natural skill for making her topic sexy and enjoyable, is explaining how the future is "morally neutral. It is neither positive nor negative. It just is and we will make what we will make of it because of the givens of human nature. The challenge is to understand how those givens - how we are wired, if you like - will affect how we react to what happens in the future."

Fox quotes the example of mobile phones. "When they first became widely available, we could have responded negatively because we don't like new technology. But one of the fundamentals of human nature is our desire for social bonding and mobile phones facilitate that, so they have succeeded."

Fox describes herself as "small, skinny and nondescript", but, she adds, before you start fearing for her self-esteem, that's just how she needs to be because of the demands of her work. To people-watch effectively, she has to fade into the background. "I'm researching a book at the moment about how we shop and what that tells us about us, and so I spend whole afternoons tracking people around shops, watching what they're doing via mirrors or eavesdropping on their conversations."

When she's not acting like a B-movie detective, Fox and the five colleagues with whom she set up Sirc - an independent, not-for-profit organisation - are working to apply their academic knowledge of human behaviour patterns that date back to the Stone Age, to current social trends. It is what she likes to call "evolutionary psychology", assessing how some of our core impulses - risk-taking, pleasure-seeking, rule-breaking - determine our reaction to the world around us.

This back-to-the-future approach can bring Fox to unconventional conclusions about where we are heading. "Take the example of the rise of individualism," she says. "We are told that our society is becoming more and more individualistic and selfish, but I believe that conclusion is based on mistaken assumptions. Yes, there is a rise in social isolation and a fragmentation of traditional communities, but our basic instinct remains towards social bonding. So we create new tribes - of friends, work colleagues or people we share an interest with rather than community or family."

Her recent portfolio of work has covered the social and cultural aspects of drinking (including a book called Pubwatching, co-authored with Desmond Morris), the good manners of horse-race goers and investigations into gossip, flirting, DIY and Englishness. The last subject was, she admits, an odd one for her to tackle, since despite being born in England, she spent the years between her sixth and 16th birthdays first in the US and then France and had, on returning to these shores, to go to Cambridge "to relearn what it means to be English".

Such an eclectic range of topics means she gets teased by more conventional colleagues for being "frivolous and girlie" - and even by her father, Robin, himself a distinguished academic. But, like her great friend Professor Susan Greenfield, she is determined to be a scientist who breaks the mould in her academic world and who communicates her subject to a wider audience. Indeed Greenfield has been a "kind of fairy godmother" to Fox in more than one way. She introduced her to her husband, a neuro-surgeon and was "best man" at their wedding.

'Watching the English' by Kate Fox is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £8.99. To order a copy call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897

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