---
title: "How Do the Networking Structures of the Poor and Rich Differ?"
description: "Chinese people love to talk about connections, with a modern saying that 'social relations are productive forces.' While many engage in networking, some ambitious youths disdain it. Yet, regardless of personal preference, doing things in society often relies on various relationships. Asking for help is not necessarily shameful, and being alone is not necessarily glorious. 'Relationships' are a normal phenomenon, but they are not simple. Many may think the key to building valuable connections is seeking intimate relationships, like 'classmates who studied together or comrades who fought together,' but sociologists think otherwise."
author: "New Distribution"
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published: "2015-11-27"
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---

# How Do the Networking Structures of the Poor and Rich Differ?

> Chinese people love to talk about connections, with a modern saying that 'social relations are productive forces.' While many engage in networking, some ambitious youths disdain it. Yet, regardless of personal preference, doing things in society often relies on various relationships. Asking for help is not necessarily shameful, and being alone is not necessarily glorious. 'Relationships' are a normal phenomenon, but they are not simple. Many may think the key to building valuable connections is seeking intimate relationships, like 'classmates who studied together or comrades who fought together,' but sociologists think otherwise.

We Chinese people love to talk about connections, and there is a modern saying that 'social relations are productive forces.' Networking is something many people do, but it is also looked down upon by some ambitious young people. However, no matter how much you dislike it, doing things in society often depends on various relationships. Asking for help is not necessarily shameful, and being alone is not necessarily glorious. 'Relationships' are a normal phenomenon, and this phenomenon is not simple. Perhaps in many people's eyes, the key to building valuable connections is to seek a relatively intimate relationship, such as 'having studied together or served in the army together,' but sociologists恰恰 do not think so.

The famous sociologist, now a professor at Stanford University, Mark Granovetter, specifically studied how professionals, technicians, and managers living in the suburbs of Boston found jobs in the 1970s, and used the results as his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. Granovetter found 282 people and then randomly selected 100 for face-to-face interviews. He found that less than half got jobs through formal channels, such as looking at advertisements and submitting resumes. Of the 100 people, 54 found jobs through personal connections. This is a considerable number—while homebodies agonize over how to write their resumes, more than half of the jobs have already been taken by those with connections.

But what is truly interesting here is not relying on connections, but on what kind of connections.

**The Networking Structure of the Poor and Rich**

The so-called 'more friends, more paths'—so which kind of friend is more likely to provide this path? Granovetter found that the truly useful connections are not the 'strong ties' of frequent meetings like close friends and family, but 'weak ties.' Among those who found jobs through connections, only 16.7% saw their 'connection' frequently, meaning at least twice a week. 55.6% used connections they only met occasionally, meaning less than twice a week but at least once a year. Another 27.8% of helpers were not seen even once a year. That is to say, most of the connections you actually use are those you do not see often. These people are not necessarily big shots; they may be old classmates or colleagues you have not contacted for a while, or even people you barely know. Their common feature is that they are not in your current social circle.

Granovetter has an explanation for this phenomenon. The people you hang out with all the time are likely doing similar things to you, and their ideas must be similar. If you do not know about such a job opportunity, how would they know? Only 'weak ties' can tell you things you do not know. Granovetter expanded this theory into a paper called 'The Strength of Weak Ties,' which is possibly the most cited sociology paper in history, with over 20,000 citations. The data in this study is so simple, the idea so simple, yet its influence is profound. Now the concept of 'weak ties' has entered the self-help field. In 2010, someone published a book, Superconnect: Harnessing the Power of Networks and the Strength of Weak Links, which talks at length about the usefulness of weak ties. The Chinese version is more direct, called 'Super Connections.'

The true meaning of 'weak ties' is to connect different social circles and provide you with useful information from outside your circle. According to weak tie theory, the number of opportunities a person gets in society is closely related to the structure of their social network. If you only associate with close friends and family, or if the people you know are all similar to you in background, then you are likely to have fewer opportunities than those who know all kinds of people. The key to networking is not which circle you join, but how many people outside your circle you can reach. If so, can we judge a person's economic status from their social network structure?

In 2010, three American researchers, Eagle, Macy, and Claxton, did something somewhat astonishing to test this idea. They took almost all phone call records in the UK in August 2005, covering 90% of mobile phones and over 99% of landlines. These call records constituted a visible social network. It was difficult for researchers to know each person's economic situation, but the UK government had data on the economic status of every neighborhood—you could check which areas were rich and which were poor. They then compared the phone call records with the economic rankings of the residents in over 30,000 neighborhoods. The results were very clear: the richer the neighborhood, the more 'diversity' in their interactions. But looking closer at the results, there are more interesting things.

**The More Diverse Your Social Network, the Higher Your Economic Ranking**

In statistics, we use the 'correlation coefficient' to indicate the correlation between two things. Its value is between -1 and 1. The closer to 1, the more likely the two things increase or decrease together; a negative value indicates they change in opposite directions. This study found that the correlation coefficients between a neighborhood's economic ranking and its social network's 'social diversity' and 'geographic diversity' were 0.73 and 0.58, respectively. This means that the richer people are, the more likely they are to connect with people from different classes and regions, and class diversity is more important than geographic diversity.

The essence of weak tie theory is not 'connections' but information transmission. Close friends and family are willing to communicate with us, but after too much talk, there is nothing new. The most efficient communication might be with people we are not very familiar with. How can this conjecture be verified?

**Who Gives You Important Information?**

Now with the internet, researchers can better analyze through what kind of connections we gain new knowledge. For example, on various social media, you often read and forward recommendations from netizens. Are recommendations from close friends more useful, or those from weak ties? Facebook's data team conducted a very cleverly designed study on this issue in 2012. The researchers had a simple way to judge the strength of the connection between you and various netizens. For example, if you often comment on each other's status updates, then you have a strong tie; otherwise, it is a weak tie.

This study counted the web links people shared on Facebook—if you share a link, you probably think it is useful. There are two possibilities for sharing. One is that your friend (whether strong or weak tie) posted the link first, and you saw it and forwarded it. The other is that you discovered the link yourself.

**The results found:**

1. Our forwarding behavior is quite selective; we are more willing to forward information shared by 'strong ties.' Statistics show that if a strong tie sends us a piece of information, the probability of us forwarding it is about twice that of a weak tie. This is natural, as strong ties already have similar interests. Some people even worry whether social media has exacerbated the situation of 'birds of a feather flock together.' Will we turn our social circles into isolated islands by always staying with like-minded people?

2. Useful information from strong ties is something you might have discovered yourself; but useful information from weak ties, if they did not tell you, you probably would not have found it.

3. Considering the total amount of information people receive from both types of ties, and weighting them by the corresponding sharing probabilities, it was found that the influence of information from weak ties far exceeds that from strong ties. That is, although people value strong ties, most of their knowledge still comes from weak ties.

Now the 'weak tie' theory has been extended to any new message or new idea. Whether you just want to learn something, find a job, or start a business, you should avoid the 'strong ties' in mature circles and go out to pursue 'weak ties.'

**Be Cautious About Partnering with Acquaintances**

Statistics have shown that getting ideas from weak ties, and even starting a business with weak ties, is conducive to improving a company's innovation capability. Sociologist Martin Ruef surveyed 766 'entrepreneurs' who obtained MBA degrees from a university in the western United States (actually Stanford University, although the paper does not explicitly state it) and had at least attempted to start their own businesses. He wanted to discover the relationship between weak ties and innovation. Ruef counted the personnel composition and information sources of the companies founded by these MBAs, and used various methods to assess the innovation capability of these companies, such as whether they launched new products or new sales methods, whether they entered international markets, how many patents they had, etc.

Where did the idea that directly stimulated you to start a business come from? Ruef found that only 38% of the entrepreneurial ideas came from discussions with strong ties like family and friends. In contrast, 52% came from discussions with weak ties such as customers and suppliers—business partners. Others were inspired by media or experts. It is clear that the law that good ideas come from weak ties works from the very beginning of entrepreneurship.

People find it hard to resist the temptation of strong ties. For example, in our minds, people in the venture capital industry should be relatively rational, or at least relatively ruthless, right? But even these people make the mistake of pursuing strong ties, and this mistake costs them significantly.

This is a very new study. In June 2012, Gompers, Mukharlyamov, and Yuhai Xuan of Harvard Business School published a paper titled 'The Cost of Friendship.' This study examined 3,510 venture capitalists and their 11,895 investment projects between 1975 and 2003. Some people chose to cooperate with those of similar ability, such as both being from prestigious schools; but more people chose to cooperate with their 'acquaintances,' such as former classmates, colleagues, or simply because they were of the same race. The study found that partnering by ability can increase the success rate of investments, while partnering with acquaintances significantly reduces the likelihood of investment success.

Everyone likes strong ties, even venture capitalists and Stanford MBAs. We like to hang out with them, we like to call them, we like to forward their tweets. But friendship is friendship, and work is work. When we consider finding someone to start a business with, cooperate with, or even just to learn information from, 'weak ties' are the best choice. Now sociology has enough evidence to show that for work, hometown associations and alumni directories are not good places to expand your network.

Source: Doujiu

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