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By Root 1000 0

in small-world experiments, it turns out, do not typically pass messages to their highest-status or most-connected friends. Instead, they pass them to people they think have something in common with the target, like geographic proximity or a similar occupation, or they simply pass them to people they think will be likely to continue passing it along. Ordinary individuals, in other words, are just as capable of spanning critical divides between social and professional circles, between different nations, or between different neighborhoods, as exceptional people. When you want to get a message to a graduate student in Novosibirsk, Russia, for example, you don’t think about whom you know who has a lot of friends, or goes to lots of parties, or has connections to the White House. You think about whether you know any Russians. And if you don’t know any Russians, then maybe you know someone from Eastern Europe, or someone who has traveled to Eastern Europe, or has studied Russian, or who lives in a part of your city that is known for its Eastern European immigrants. Mrs. Roosevelt, or Lois Weisberg for that matter, may indeed connect many people. But those same people have many other ways of connecting as well. And it is these other, less obvious ways that they tend to actually use, if only because there are so many more of them.

The overall message here is that real social networks are connected in more complex and more egalitarian ways than Jacobs or even Milgram imagined—a result that has now been confirmed with many experiments, empirical studies, and theoretical models.10 In spite of all this evidence, however, when we think about how social networks work, we continue to be drawn to the idea that certain “special people,” whether famous wives of presidents or gregarious local businessmen, are disproportionately responsible for connecting the rest of us. Evidence, in fact, seems to have very little to do with why we think this way. After all, Jacobs was writing years before Milgram’s experiments and long before anyone had the kind of data that might have supported her claim about Mrs. Roosevelt. So wherever she got the idea from, it obviously wasn’t based on any actual evidence. Rather, it seems that Jacobs was drawn to the idea that a few special people connect everyone else simply because without invoking such people it’s hard to come with any explanation at all. The result is that no matter how many times the evidence rules out one kind of special person, we simply insert another. If it’s not Mrs. Roosevelt, then it must be Lois Weisberg, and if it’s not Lois Weisberg, then it must be Mr. Jacobs the clothing merchant. And if it’s not him, then it must be our friend Ed who seems to know everyone. “It’s got to be someone special.” We feel compelled to conclude: “How else could it work?”

Nor is the intuitive appeal of special-people explanations restricted to problems to do with networks. The “great man” view of history explains important historical events in terms of the actions of a few critical leaders. Conspiracy theorists imbue shadowy government agents or secret cabals with near infinite capabilities to meddle with society. Media analysts credit high-profile celebrities with setting fashion trends or selling products. Corporate boards pay exorbitant amounts for a CEO whose decisions will shape the fate of the entire company. Epidemiologists worry that a few “superspreaders” can trigger an epidemic. And marketers extol the power of “influencers” to make or break a brand, change social norms, or otherwise shift public opinion.11 In his book The Tipping Point, for example, Gladwell explains the origins of what he calls social epidemics, meaning everything from fads and fashions to shifts in cultural norms and sudden drops in crime rates, in terms of what he calls the law of the few. Just as superspreaders drive real epidemics and great men drive history, so too the law of the few claims that social epidemics are “driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people.” For example, in discussing the mysterious resurgence