It’s Still Who You Know That Counts
Why are long-tie relationships so important? Extensive new research finds that those with diverse connections are more prosperous and socially adept
A new research article published July 6 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences builds on decades of social science about the importance of relationships and social networking outside of your immediate circle — and it also adds a new twist. The article, Long Ties, Disruptive Life Events, and Economic Prosperity, supports the idea that “long ties,” which connect people who lack mutual contacts, are more valuable than people realize. These ties also correlate with “individuals’ success within firms” and with their economic prosperity. The authors, Eaman Jahani, Samuel P. Fraiberger, Michael Bailey, and Dean Eckles,
“provide evidence of a robust positive relationship” between long ties and economic outcomes in the United States and Mexico.
The research expands on recent work as well as a seminal study, “The Strength of Weak Ties. That paper, written by Stanford Professor Mark Granovetter in 1973, maintains that infrequent, arms-length relationships are more beneficial for employment opportunities, promotions, and wages than strong ties. In other words, weak ties can be your strongest allies. Granovetter, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, served as editor for the new paper.
To update the work, Jahani and his co-authors used Facebook public comments to analyze individual-level differences at the population scale. Jahani is a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics; Eckles is a research lead at the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). Read more about the paper here.
MIT IDE Content Director, Paula Klein, asked Jahani to distill the major findings of the new paper in the following Q&A.
IDE: What are the highlights and scope of the new geographic research data you used from Meta? How does it build on earlier work?
Jahani: The new data, which we’ve made publicly available, describes the structure of people’s social networks on Facebook across the United States and Mexico. For each zip code or county, you can look up the structure of the social networks of the people who live there. This shows what fraction of their social network ties are long ties — ties without mutual contacts.
We found a robust relationship between social networks and economic outcomes. It corroborates previous findings on the important role of ties with fewer or no mutual contacts. Beyond that, however, we bring the interplay of social structure and strength of ties into focus and show the special value of strong long ties — where there is more frequent interaction, and where there is trust for sharing information.
We’re hoping to bring attention both to our substantive findings and to encourage other researchers (in academia and otherwise) to make use of this new data. We believe this data has immense potential in economic development and planning.
IDE: What are the most surprising and significant findings of the research?
Jahani: The large-scale evidence about how long ties predict economic prosperity is key, but the most novel aspect of the work is looking at how these ties originate. The importance of long ties was previously known, but it was mostly unclear how or why some people seem to develop and maintain such important social connections.
We show the importance of life events in the ability of people to maintain these ties.
Disruptive life events that expose people to a different community, such as moving to a new school, force individuals to form new friendships with people from a potentially different background. People with these experiences tend to have more long ties many years later, which can help them to achieve better economic outcomes.
These findings suggest that developing long ties requires a certain set of skills and dispositions. And they highlight how people can learn these skills through — potentially disruptive and challenging — life experiences. We hope that the findings motivate other scholars to look into the determinants of long ties and characterize the most effective ways these skills can be taught at a young age.
IDE: What are the biggest takeaways for the digital economy — social media users, platform companies, and society as a whole?
Jahani: Our findings emphasize the significance of social capital in long ties and have broad implications. As noted, long ties have a vital role in facilitating positive outcomes across various contexts — enhanced access to opportunities, reduced inequality, increased organizational creativity, and a diversified range of opinions, consequently mitigating the spread of misinformation.
Our results indicate that the benefits of long ties are more likely to be fully realized when they are also strong and long lasting. As a result, it makes sense for companies to encourage their employees to cultivate and nurture such relationships within an organization.
Likewise, social media platform companies can actively promote these links as an organic and self-reinforcing solution to avert bad consequences. Often, recommendation algorithms are built around closing lots of open triangles (i.e. getting you to follow someone already followed by people you follow), but this may just create lots of redundancy. Our view reinforces a recent paper, A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties, by IDE Director Sinan Aral and coauthors based on “People You May Know” algorithms on LinkedIn: Weak ties have strong value.
Finally, policymakers can strive to create environments that empower young adults and offer them the necessary resources to explore diverse relationships and realize their potential.
IDE: What does the research tell us about the impact of online networks and interactions on our offline lives?
Jahani: As the economy continues to digitize, the significance of online professional and personal networks has never been greater. Many job opportunities are secured through online contacts, and opinions are sometimes predominantly shaped within online communities. While online networks initially held promise in creating a level playing field and fostering strong and diverse communities, our research, along with that of other scholars, highlights the pressing need to promote inclusivity and diversity within these networks for the average individual.
Our findings reveal significant disparities in the structure of online networks across different U.S. zip codes, which can have repercussions both online and offline.
Consequently, we aspire for our work to contribute to a comprehensive discourse among researchers on how to fulfill the potential of the digital age, fostering the growth of better online communities and ensuring their sustainability.
This discussion must address the incentives for both platform designers and individual users to seek outcomes that lead to better social welfare. As the incentives can often be misaligned, we strongly advocate that policymakers and government officials actively participate in this dialogue given their unique ability to shape appropriate incentives and establish parallel programs that foster more effective networks within offline communities.
Read more on the MIT Sloan web site here.
