A recently published study about social networks finds that so-called long ties — connections between people who otherwise lack any mutual contacts — are highly associated with greater economic success in life. Those long ties are fostered partly by turning points such as moving between states, and switching schools.

The study, based on a large quantity of Facebook data, both illuminates how productive social networks are structured and identifies specific life events that significantly shape people’s networks.

“People who have more long ties [on Facebook], and who have stronger long ties, have better economic indicators,” saysDean Eckles, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings.

To conduct the study, the authors mapped all reciprocal interactions among U.S.-based Facebook accounts from December 2020 to June 2021, to build a data-rich picture of social networks in action. The researchers maintain a distinction between “long” and “short” ties; in this definition, long ties have no other mutual connections at all, while short ties have some.

Ultimately the scholars found that, when assessing everyone who has lived in the same state since 2012, those who had previously moved among U.S. states had 13 percent more long ties on Facebook than those who had not. Similarly, people who had switched high schools had 10 percent more long ties than people who had not.

Additionally, the research evaluates whether or not moving among states, or switching schools, is itself what causes people to have more long ties. After all, it could be the case that families who move more often have qualities that lead family members to be more proactive about forging ties with people.

“Our hope is that the study provides better evidence of this really strong relationship, at the scale of the entire U.S,” Eckles says. “There hasn’t really been this sort of investigation into those types of disruptive life events.”

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Source: PNAS | MIT Sloan