• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1107 0

matter, or that people care about more than just money. Likewise, a moment’s introspection would suggest that success is at least partly luck, that prophecies can be self-fulfilling, and that even the best-laid plans tend to suffer from the law of unintended consequences. Any thoughtful person knows, of course, that the future is unpredictable, and that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. He or she would also know that humans are biased and sometimes irrational, that political systems are rife with inefficiencies and contradictions, that spin sometimes trumps substance, and that simple stories can obscure complicated truths. He or she may even know—or at least have heard it enough to believe it—that everyone is connected to everyone else by just “six degrees of separation.” When the subject is human behavior, in other words, it is actually hard to imagine anything that social scientists could possibly discover that wouldn’t sound obvious to a thoughtful person, no matter how difficult it might have been to figure it out.

What isn’t obvious, however, is how all these “obvious” things fit together. We know, for example, that people influence each other, and we know that hit movies, books, and songs are many times more successful than the average. But what we don’t know is how—or even if—the forces of social influence operating at the level of the individual drive inequality and unpredictability at the scale of entire markets. Likewise, we know that people in social networks tend to cluster together in relatively homogeneous groups. But what we can’t infer from our own observations of the world is whether these patterns are driven by psychological preferences or structural constraints. Nor is it obvious that it is because of this local clustering, rather than in spite of it, that individuals can navigate through very large networks to reach distant strangers in only a small number of steps. At some level, we accept that the future is unpredictable, but we do not know how much of that unpredictability could be eliminated simply by thinking through the possibilities more carefully, and how much is inherently random in the way that a roll of the dice is random. Even less clear to us is how this balance between predictability and unpredictability ought to change the kinds of strategies we deploy to prepare for future contingencies, or the kinds of explanations we come up with for the outcomes we observed.

It is in resolving these sorts of puzzles that social science can hope to advance well beyond where we can get on the strength of common sense and intuition alone. Better yet, as more such puzzles get resolved, it may turn out that similar sorts of mechanisms come into play in many of them, leading us, perhaps, to the kind of “middle-range” theories that Robert Merton had in mind back in the 1960s. What can we learn by studying social influence in cultural markets that can also tell us something useful about the relationship between financial incentives and individual performance? How, for example, can we connect our findings about the difference between real and perceived similarity in political attitudes with our findings about the origins of similarity in social networks? What can these findings in turn tell us about social influence and collective behavior? And how can we connect network search and social influence, decision making, incentives and performance, perceptions and polarization with the “big” questions of social science—like inequality, social justice, and economic policy?

It isn’t clear that we can. Almost certainly, some of the problems that sociologists and other social scientists find interesting will lie forever beyond the reach of precise measurement. No matter how much the Internet and other new technologies affect their field, therefore, the traditional tools of social scientists—archival research, fieldwork, theoretical models, and deep introspection—will continue to play important roles. Nor is it necessarily the case that the most complicated and pressing real-world problems—such as