The Power of Strong and Weak Ties
Recently, an article in the New York Times discussed the potential impact of online social networking sites on voter turnout, a particularly relevant topic given the upcoming election in November as well as the boom in social media. As a result, politicians from all parts of the political spectrum have begun exploring the use of social media to enhance their campaigns, whether it is reaching out to voters or addressing particular voter concerns via sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The relationship between voter turnout and social media is thus a good example of the power of networks.
The article cites a study in which researchers from Facebook and the University of California, San Diego found that “a special ‘get out the vote’ message, showing each user pictures of friends who said they had already voted, generated 340,000 additional votes nationwide” (NYTimes) on Election Day 2010, regardless of the Facebook users’ political party affiliation. This study, conducted on millions of Facebook users, consisted of three groups of users –1) the majority of users received a nonpartisan “get out the vote” message at the top of their homepages, along with pictures of friends who had already voted; 2) a group of about 600,000 users received the same message but without their friends’ pictures; and 3) a group of about another 600,000 users did not receive a message at all. From this segregation of groups, researchers determined that 60,000 more votes were generated nationwide as a result of the message showing friends who had already voted, and 280,000 more votes were generated by what these scientists called the “social contagion effect” – an effect in which friends of friends seemed to have influenced the user’s decision to vote.
This study relates directly to the topic of strong and weak ties that we covered in class. With regards to the additional 60,000 votes, the study found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, users were more likely to vote if they saw that their “strong ties” had voted – that is, if their close friends had already voted, then these users were more likely to become influenced and vote as well. This supports the idea that behavioral patterns are more infectious among groups of close friends, a concept we developed in class by studying topics like the Strong Triadic Closure Property, which states that among a group of three friends A, B, and C, if A and B have strong ties as friends, and B and C have strong ties as friends, then it is very likely that A and C are also related in some way. This voting pattern among close friends is thus understandable.
More interestingly, however, the study also found that friends of friends were indirectly influenced as far as their decisions to vote went. We can liken this real-world example to the job-searching example we studied in class and in Homework 1. We found that it is more likely for person A to find a job through distant friends rather than through close friends. We attributed this phenomenon to the fact that those within your close social circle know generally the same amount and type of information that you know, whereas the distant friend (perhaps a friend of a friend) has access to information that no one (including you) in your social circle had direct access to. Thus, it is more likely that you will discover new job opportunities from distant friends rather than close ones because you have different levels of access to information. Similarly, those within user A’s close circle of friends may see that the friends of their close friends had already voted, and, wanting to follow this trend, user A may also find herself more likely to vote. As we discussed in class, this may occur because user A may believe that her distant friends (that is, friends of friends) may know something about the election that she and her close friends do not, which is a reasonable assumption given the fact that a close circle of friends may all have access to a common pool of knowledge because they have strong ties with one another, but not have access to another common pool of knowledge among another group of distant friends. Thus, seeing that those distant friends had voted, user A may be indirectly influenced to vote as well.
Arguably, then, the combination of the powers of strong and weak ties on users resulted in the additional 260,000 votes garnered by the use of the Facebook message and attached pictures. Though this number may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of the election, the article notes that we can look to the 2000 presidential election, which “was decided by less than 0.01 percent of the vote in Florida” (NYTimes). In a case like that, a number like 260,000 could have potentially strong impacts on individual races, a nod to the power of networks in influencing behavioral patterns.
Finally, I would like to tie this idea to the social movement “Occupy Wall Street.” Though this movement was started by only a few persistent protesters, word spread among friends and friends of friends, resulting in a much larger protest and hence a larger impact. Indeed, the Cornell Daily Sun spoke about a few Cornell students who went down to New York City to participate in “Occupy Wall Street,” having heard of the idea from friends. Without networks, these students most likely would not have heard about the movement or been driven to participate. This inspiration to act can again be attributed to strong and weak ties and their influence of behavioral patterns, just as these ties affected voter turnout and job searching.
With this information, networks could play an incredible role in influencing society. By letting trends disseminate so organically among groups of friends and friends of friends, the article suggests that we can harness this phenomenon to approach many other issues, such as weight loss. Far-reaching social movements would no longer seem as daunting or even impossible with the knowledge that networks can steer human behavior toward desired goals. With time, the entire social landscape could change, for everything ranging from job-searching to voter turnout to advertising to protesting for a specific cause will all be drawn to the power of networks.
– mindovermoney