As the saying goes, "social relations are productive forces". Network is particularly important in modern society. Whether you like it or not, sometimes you have to rely on various relationships to get things done. Asking for help is not necessarily shameful, and loneliness is not necessarily glorious. Relationship is a normal phenomenon. Perhaps in the eyes of many people, the key to building valuable contacts is to seek closer relationships, such as "sharing guns with classmates", but sociologists just don't think so.
Mark granovetter, a famous sociologist and professor at Stanford University, studied how professionals, technicians and managers living in Boston suburbs found jobs in the 1970s, and published the research results as his doctoral thesis at Harvard University [1]. Granovetter interviewed 282 people and randomly selected 100 people for face-to-face interviews. It is found that less than half of them apply through formal channels, such as watching advertisements and submitting resumes. Of the 100 people, 54 found jobs through personal relationships-while geeks are still struggling to write resumes, more than half of the job opportunities have been taken away by those with connections.
Dependence is not new, but what kind of relationship is a very interesting question.
Network structure of the poor and the rich
As the saying goes, many friends have many roads, so what kind of friends are more likely to give this road? Granovett found that the really useful relationship is not a "strong link" between relatives and friends, but a "weak link". Only 16.7% of those who seek jobs through relationships often see their "relationships", that is, they meet at least twice a week. However, 55.6% people only use related persons occasionally, which means that they don't see them twice a week, but at least once a year. There are also 27.8% help seekers who don't meet once a year. In other words, most of the relationships you really use are people you don't often see. These people are not necessarily big shots. They may be old classmates or colleagues with little contact, or even people you don't know at all. They are similar in that they are not in your current social circle.
Granovett has an explanation for this phenomenon. These people who hang out with you all day are likely to do the same things and have similar ideas. If you didn't know there was such a job opportunity, how could they know? Only "weak relationships" can tell you something you don't know. Granovett extended this theory to a paper named "The Intensity of weak ties" [2], which is probably the most cited sociological paper in history, probably more than 20,000 times. The data of this study is so rough and the thinking is so simple, but its influence is far-reaching. Now the concept of "weak relationship" has entered the field of inspiration. 20 10 someone wrote a book called "super connection" [3], which talked about the usefulness of weak connection.
The real meaning of "weak ties" is to connect different social circles and provide you with useful information from outside. According to weak ties's theory, a person's opportunities in society are closely related to his social network structure. If you only associate with relatives and friends, or you know people with similar backgrounds, then you probably don't have as many opportunities as those who know all kinds of places. The key to networking is not which circle you belong to, but how many people outside the circle you can reach. In this way, can we judge a person's economic status from his social network structure?
In 20 10, three American researchers did an amazing thing to verify this idea [4]. In August 2005, they took away almost all the telephone communication records in Britain, covering 90% of mobile phones and more than 99% of fixed phones. These phone records form a visible social network. It is difficult for researchers to know everyone's financial situation, but Britain has data on the economic situation of every community in the country-you can find out where the rich areas are and where the poor areas are. In this way, they compared their telephone communication records with the economic rankings of more than 30,000 community residents. The result is very obvious. The richer the community, the more obvious the "diversity" of its communication. But if you look closely, there is something more interesting about this result.
The greater the diversity of social networks, the higher the economic ranking.
Statistically, we use "correlation coefficient" to express the correlation between two things, and its value is between-1 and 1. The closer to 1, the easier it is for these two things to get bigger and smaller together, and a negative value indicates that they change in opposite directions. This study found that the correlation coefficients between the economic ranking of communities and the "social diversity" and "regional diversity" of their social networks were 0.73 and 0.58 respectively. This means that the richer people are, the easier it is to get in touch with people from different classes and regions, and class diversity is more important than regional diversity. As the saying goes, "No one asks whether the poor live in a bustling city, but the rich have distant relatives in the mountains." We assume that the number of contacts of the rich should also be higher, because they know more people than the poor-this is also true, but the correlation coefficient between the number of contacts and the economic ranking is only 0.44, which is not very important. The most interesting thing is that the correlation coefficient between telephone call duration and economic ranking is -0.33, which means that although the rich love to contact all kinds of people, they actually spend less time on the phone than the poor.
The problem with this data analysis is that it can only tell us that there is such a relationship between social networks and economic status, but it can't tell us who caused who. Is it because you are rich that different people are willing to contact you, or is it because you are willing to contact different types of people that you are rich? There is another problem with Granovitt's theory. In fact, we all know that the vast majority of people are weak relationships, and strong relationships are only a few. If we ask everyone we know to give us a job message, then the last useful message is definitely more likely to come from weak ties! Granovetter acknowledged this problem in his paper 1973, but he also put forward an explanation: the strong connection in life is very different from the number of times weak ties communicated with us. We exchange more information with strong links than with weak links. He can't quantify how much this kind of communication has, but the total amount of information in weak ties is not necessarily more than that of strong links. In this way, weak ties still seems to be important, because it conveys a larger proportion of valuable information. Later, similar questions were repeatedly raised, but Granovitt's theory still stood the test.
Therefore, the essence of weak ties Theory is not "networking", but information transmission. Friends and relatives are very willing to communicate with us, but talking too much is nothing new. The most effective communication may be with people you are not familiar with. How to prove this conjecture?
Who gave you the important information?
Maybe we can learn a lot from the internet. With the network, researchers can better analyze how we acquire new knowledge through which connections. For example, you often read and forward various recommendations from netizens on various social media, so which is more useful, the recommendation from close friends or the recommendation from weak relationships? In 20 12, Facebook's data team did a very clever research on this issue [5]. Researchers have a simple way to judge the strength of your contact with netizens. For example, if you often comment on each other's hair condition, then you are in a strong relationship, otherwise it is a weak relationship.
Let's take a look at the online link that people share on Facebook-if you share this link, you may think it is very useful. There are two possibilities for this sharing. One is that your friends (whether strong contacts or weak ties) send this link first, and then you forward it. The other is to find this link yourself. As you can imagine, the possibility of the former way is definitely greater than the latter. The role of social networks is to let netizens provide us with information. This study of Facebook tracked a set of specific websites through random experiments and found that others shared this address with us. We saw the possibility of forwarding it later (p_feed), for example, the possibility of sharing this address directly by ourselves (p_no feed) was more than five times. The ratio of these two possibilities (p_feed/p_no feed) is the amplification effect of sharing by netizens.
Our forwarding behavior is completely different, and people are more willing to forward information shared by "strong ties". Statistics show that if a strong contact sends us a message, the forwarding probability is about twice that of weak ties. It is natural that strong ties have similar interests. Some people even worry that social media has aggravated the situation of "birds of a feather flock together". Will we turn our social circle into an island because we are always with like-minded people?
Don't worry. The most ingenious thing about this study is that it not only compares whether we are willing to forward strong links or weak links, but also compares the amplification effects of two different links. The amplification effect of strong connection is 6, and that of weak ties is 9. That is to say, for the same website, the probability that you see a weak link to share with you and then forward it is 9 times that of finding this website and then sharing it. To put it bluntly, it is the useful information that strong contact tells you, and you may have found it yourself; And the weak link tells you useful information. If he doesn't tell you, I'm afraid you won't find it. This property is similar to what Granovetter said in the past!
Then, considering the total amount of information people receive from the two kinds of connections, and weighted average them with the corresponding sharing probability, it is found that the influence of information from weak ties far exceeds that of strong connections. In other words, although people attach importance to strong ties, most of their knowledge comes from weak ties.
Now "weak ties" theory has been extended to any new news or new ideas. Whether you just want to learn something, get a job or start a business, you should avoid the "strong ties" in mature circles and go out and pursue "weak ties", such as this interesting phenomenon I will talk about next.
Don't partner with acquaintances.
Statistics show that getting ideas from weak relationships and even starting a business in partnership with weak relationships will help improve a company's innovation ability. Sociologist Martin Ruef investigated 766 "entrepreneurs" who obtained MBA degrees from a university in the western United States (actually Stanford University) and at least tried to start their own businesses, trying to find the relationship between weak ties and innovation [6]. Ruef counts the personnel composition and information sources of the companies founded by these MBA students, and evaluates the innovation ability of these companies by various methods, such as whether they have launched new products or new sales methods, whether they have entered the international market, and how many patents they have.
Where did this idea come from? Is it a direct venture? Ruef found that only 38% of entrepreneurial ideas came from discussions with family and friends. From the discussion with weak ties's customers, suppliers and other business partners, it is as high as 52%. Others are inspired by the media or experts. It can be seen that good ideas come from the law of weak relationships and have worked since the beginning of entrepreneurship.
It seems that eating out often is better than staying at home. But entrepreneurs who don't even attend the dinner may be stronger. Now let's look at the information sources after the company started. According to the survey, if your information network in the process of starting a business is mainly composed of weak ties, your innovation ability is 1.36 times that of those companies that expect strong ties. And if you only get information from the media and unknown experts without relying on acquaintances, your innovation ability is 1.5 times that of a strong contact company. From the perspective of social networks, consistent with the results of previous British data, the more diverse your social networks are, the stronger your innovation ability will be. Entrepreneurs with extremely diverse social networks, who have strong connections with weak ties and accept the opinions of people who have never dealt with them, are three times as innovative as those with only a single social network.
Even so, most entrepreneurial teams are still composed of family and friends. The number of strong teams and weak ties teams is almost 5:3. Ruef uses an innovation evaluation model to find that the innovation ability of weak ties team is almost 1. 18 times that of the strong contact team. Furthermore, if the team members have never known each other before, then the team's innovation ability can be higher.
But it is hard for people to resist the temptation of a strong relationship. For example, in our minds, people in the venture capital industry should be more rational people, or at least more ruthless people, right? But even these people will make the mistake of pursuing strong ties, which cost them a considerable price.
This is a very new study. 20 12 In June, Gompers, Mukharlyamov and Yuhai Xuan of Harvard Business School published a paper entitled "The Price of Friendship" [7]. This paper investigates 35 10 venture capitalists and their 1 1895 investment projects during 1975-2003. Some people choose to cooperate with people with their own abilities, for example, everyone graduated from a prestigious school; But more people choose to cooperate with their "acquaintances", such as former classmates and colleagues, or just because they are of the same race. This study found that the ability of partners can increase the success rate of investment, while finding an acquaintance partner will significantly reduce the possibility of investment success.
What kind of people are these people willing to partner with? Ability is a reference factor: if two people both graduated from prestigious schools, their chances of cooperation are 8.5% higher than the average person. But the bigger reference factor is relationship: if two people are alumni of the same university, the possibility of their cooperation will increase by 20.5%. And the relationship is not as good as race! If these two people belong to the same race, the possibility of their cooperation will increase by 22.8%.
So what are the effects of different types of partnerships on the success or failure of investment? If one of the two venture capitalists graduated from a prestigious school, the possibility of the company they invest in going public in the future will increase by 9%. If his partner also graduated from a prestigious school, increase 1 1%. Therefore, choosing a partner according to ability, even if it is simply to use academic qualifications to represent ability, can really increase the probability of success. However, if you choose a colleague who has worked in the same company before, the possibility of successful venture capital investment will be reduced 18%. If you choose alumni, it will be reduced by 22%. If "ethnic group" is selected, it will be reduced by 25%.
It seems that the best partner of venture capital should be a highly educated person, who has never been to the same university or worked in the same company as you, and is not of the same race as you.
Everyone likes strong relationships, even venture capitalists and Stanford MBA. We are willing to go out to play with them, we are willing to call them, and we are willing to forward their Weibo. But when you get familiar with it, work belongs to work. When we consider looking for someone to start a business, find someone to cooperate with, even find someone to understand something, weak relationships are the best choice. Now, sociology has enough evidence to show that fellow villagers' associations and alumni records are not good places to expand work contacts. Do you like this article? Share it if you like! Show it to more people!
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