New Study Using Massive LinkedIn Data Presents Strong Casual Empirical Evidence for “Weak Ties” Theory
A September 2022 paper called A Casual Test of The Strength that published in Science by Karthik Rajkumar et al. investigated the casual validity of Mark Granovetter’s “weak ties” theory which claims that people are likelier to get opportunities to new jobs from acquaintances and other people that they are at “arm’s length” relationships. The reason for this finding is an individual’s close friends are likely to have access to information the individual already knows, whereas an acquaintance can introduce an individual to new sources of information that can lead to new opportunities.
The researchers designed two large experiment using LinkedIn data. The first wave contained about 4 million participants from every continent, and the second wave began in 2019 with 16 million participants. Participants were assigned to other people they were not familiar with using a modification of LinkedIn’s People You May Know (PYMK) algorithm. The benefit of running experiments of this large size is that it enables one to measure how tie strength (which researchers measure as the number of individuals having mutual and also indirect connections with each other) varies across geography and time. One key finding Rajkumar et al. found was that the probability of an individual joining a new company with mutual contacts increased the number of mutual contacts but decreased after 10 mutual contacts. This finding provides strong empirical evidence that weak ties do in fact lead to access to new jobs, but there is that chance of finding a new job decreases once the number of mutual contacts exceeds a certain threshold. A reason for this could possibly be that as an individuals increases the number of mutual contacts in a firm, any additional connections does not provide access to new information.
Sources:
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4476
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4476