Weak Ties: Stronger than they Sound
One of the first topics touched on in INFO 2040 was “the strength of weak ties”. We learned about what made a network “balanced” and how weak ties played a role in tangible, real life networks, such as groups of people. When discussing the phenomenon of these weak ties, Professor Kleinberg made it a point to explain how weak ties can help bridge the gaps between largely disconnected, distant clusters of people within a larger network.
In the article The real strength of weak ties, research behind the importance of weak ties in the job market reveals that “weaker social connections” can have a greater positive impact in job searching and the labor market.
This team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford conducted experiments through Linkedin, a professional social media platform where employers and job seekers can connect, share information, and network. The researchers explained that although the theory behind the strength of weak ties is not old by any means, there needed to be more research done in a practical mode to fully understand just how strong these weak ties were.
According to the article,
“The strength of weak ties theory is based on the idea that weak ties allow distant clusters of people to access novel information that can lead to new opportunities, innovation, and increased productivity.”
To test this, the researches ran a 5 year experiment on Linkedin that included a whopping 20 million different users. They took advantage of a Linkedin algorithm called “People You May Know” (PYMK), which matches you with potential users who you may have something in common with. They randomly matched some users with more weak ties and others with more strong ties, and analyzed the “labor mobility of the two groups over five years”. They found that the users who had more weak ties present in their PYMK algorithms saw significant increase in job mobility when compared to the group who had more strong ties!
This research is eye-opening in that, perhaps contrary to popular or natural human thinking, we must look past our strong connections which make up the groups that we associate with, and look towards the weaker connections, as there is proven potential to open up a world of new opportunity.
Source article: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/09/15/real-strength-weak-ties/