The Matthew Effect

The Matthew Effect

The sociologist of science Robert K. Merton presented his idea of the Matthew effect, by which people take from the poor to give to the rich.* He looked at the performance of scientists and showed how an initial advantage follows someone through life. Consider the following process.

Let’s say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who have worked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity, that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly cite three of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without having read the original work; rather, they’ll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names become associated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the other members of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, but simply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, these successful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. Academic success is partly (but significantly) a lottery.*

It is easy to test the effect of reputation. One way would be to find papers that were written by famous scientists, had their authors’ identities changed by mistake, and got rejected. You could verify how many of these rejections were subsequently overturned after the true identities of the authors were established. Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people’s work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it’s an “I quote you, you quote me” type of business).

Eventually, authors who are not often cited will drop out of the game by, say, going to work for the government (if they are of a gentle nature), or for the Mafia, or for a Wall Street firm (if they have a high level of hormones). Those who got a good push in the beginning of their scholarly careers will keep getting persistent cumulative advantages throughout life. It is easier for the rich to get richer, for the famous to become more famous.

In sociology, Matthew effects bear the less literary name “cumulative advantage.” This theory can easily apply to companies, businessmen, actors, writers, and anyone else who benefits from past success. If you get published in The New Yorker because the color of your letterhead attracted the attention of the editor, who was daydreaming of daisies, the resultant reward can follow you for life. More significantly, it will follow others for life. Failure is also cumulative; losers are likely to also lose in the future, even if we don’t take into account the mechanism of demoralization that might exacerbate it and cause additional failure.

Note that art, because of its dependence on word of mouth, is extremely prone to these cumulative-advantage effects. I mentioned clustering in Chapter 1, and how journalism helps perpetuate these clusters. Our opinions about artistic merit are the result of arbitrary contagion even more than our political ideas are. One person writes a book review; another person reads it and writes a commentary that uses the same arguments. Soon you have several hundred reviews that actually sum up in their contents to no more than two or three because there is so much overlap. For an anecdotal example read Fire the Bastards!, whose author, Jack Green, goes systematically through the reviews of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. Green shows clearly how book reviewers anchor on other reviews and reveals powerful mutual influence, even in their wording. This phenomenon is reminiscent of the herding of financial analysts I discussed in Chapter 10.

The advent of the modern media has accelerated these cumulative advantages. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted a link between the increased concentration of success and the globalization of culture and economic life. But I am not trying to play sociologist here, only show that unpredictable elements can play a role in social outcomes.

Merton’s cumulative-advantage idea is related to “preferential attachment,” in which already well-connected or successful participants are more likely to attract further connections or opportunities. Merton was interested in the social aspect of knowledge, not in the dynamics of social randomness, so his studies were derived separately from research on the dynamics of randomness in more mathematical sciences.