The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors

by Matthew O. Jackson

Overview

A fresh and intriguing look at how our "hidden positions" in various social structures, or human networks, shape how we think and behave, how our very outlook on life is formed—by a distinguished professor of economics at Stanford University.

Inequality, social immobility, and political polarization are but a few crucial phenomena driven by the inevitability of social structures. Social structures determine who has power and influence, can explain why people fail to assimilate basic facts, and can help us understand patterns of contagion—from the spread of disease to financial crises. Despite their primary role in shaping our lives, human networks are often overlooked when we try to account for our most important political and economic behaviors and trends. This book illuminates the complexity of the social networks in which we are positioned, sometimes unwittingly, and can help us to better undertstand why we are who we are as individuals.
     Ranging across disciplines—psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, and business—and rich with historical analogies and anecdotes, The Human Network provides an eye-opening and fascinating account of what can drive success or failure in life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101871430
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

MATTHEW O. JACKSON is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University (where he received his Ph.D. in 1988), an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has received the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the Berkeley Electronic Press Arrow Prize for Senior Economists, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served as co-editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the Review of Economic Design, and Econometrica. He co-teaches a popular game theory course on Coursera.org along with Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav Shoham.

Read an Excerpt

From:
 
1 · Introduction: Networks and Human Behavior
 
The More Things Change
 
On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in the dusty small city of Sidi Bouzid in cen­tral Tunisia, lit himself on fire. He did so as a desperate statement of outrage at the tyrannical government that had ruled Tunisia for more than two decades and repeatedly crushed any opposition. His family had long been outspoken against the government and he found himself regularly harassed by the local police. That morning, the police publicly humiliated him and confiscated his day’s produce. Mohamed had borrowed the money to buy his produce, and its loss was the last of many straws. Mohamed drenched himself in gasoline and burned himself alive in protest.

Decades ago, the several-thousand-person protest that quickly followed would have been the end of the story. Few outside of Sidi Bouzid would have even been aware that anything happened. How­ever, videos of the aftermath of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation were impossible to contain and were quickly shared via social media and reported widely. News of the Tunisian and other governments’ oppression had already been spreading after confidential documents appeared weeks earlier on WikiLeaks. The Arab Spring that would follow was enabled by and coordinated via social media such as Face­book and Twitter as well as cell phones.1
 
Although the methods of communication were modern, ulti­mately it was a network of humans spreading news and outrage. What was new was how widely and quickly news could spread, and how people were able to coordinate their responses. But understanding what happened still boils down to understanding how news spreads between people and how their behaviors influence each other.
 
The size and ferocity of the resulting Tunisian protests toppled the government by mid-January. The insurgency had also spread to neighboring Algeria, and over the next two months erupted in Oman, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, and Syria, and even Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The successes and failures of the Arab Spring are open to debate. But the swift proliferation of protests throughout that part of the world was not only unprecedented but highlighted the importance of human networks in our lives.
 
As dramatic as recent changes in human communication have been, as Thomas Friedman’s quote above indicates, the world has shrunk many times before—in the wake of: the printing press, the posting of letters, overseas travel, trains, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, airplanes, television, and the fax machine. Internet tech­nology and social media are only the latest chapter in the long his­tory of changes in how people interact, at what distance, how quickly, and with whom.
 
Yet even as networks of interactions between humans change, much about them is enduring and predictable. Understanding human networks, as well as how they are changing, can help us to answer many questions about our world, such as: How does a person’s posi­tion in a network determine their influence and power? What sys­tematic errors do we make when forming opinions based on what we learn from our friends? How do financial contagions work and why are they different from the spread of a flu? How do splits in our social networks feed inequality, immobility, and polarization? How is globalization changing international conflict and wars?
Despite their prominent role in the answers to these questions, human networks are often overlooked when people analyze impor­tant political and economic behaviors and trends. This is not to say that we have not been studying networks, but instead that there is a chasm between our scientific knowledge of networks as drivers of human behavior and what the general public and policymakers know. This book is meant to help close that gap.
 
Each chapter shows how accounting for networks of human rela­tionships changes our thinking about an issue. Thus, the theme of this book is how networks enhance our understanding of many of our social and economic behaviors.
 
There are a few key patterns of networks that matter, and so the story here involves more than just one idea hammered home. By the end of this book, you should be more keenly aware of the importance of several aspects of the networks in which you live. Our discussion will also involve two different perspectives: one is how networks form and why they exhibit certain key patterns, and the other is how those patterns determine our power, opinions, opportunities, behav­iors, and accomplishments.

Table of Contents

 
1. Introduction: Networks and Human Behavior 3
2. Power and Influence: Central Positions in Networks 11
3. Diffusion and Contagion 44
4. Too Connected to Fail: Financial Networks 68
5. Homophily: Houses Divided 93
6. Immobility and Inequality: Network Feedback and Poverty Traps 117
7. The Wisdom and Folly of the Crowd 160
8. The Influence of Our Friends and Our Local Network Structures 198
9. Globalization: Our Changing Networks 224
 
Acknowledgments 241
Notes 243
Bibliography 283
Index 321

Editorial Reviews

2018-12-16

A worthy exploration of "how networks form and why they exhibit certain key patterns" as well as "how those patterns determine our power, opinions, opportunities, behaviors, and accomplishments."

Early on in his first book for a general audience, Jackson (Economics/Stanford Univ.; Social and Economic Networks, 2008, etc.) looks at the friend paradox: Almost everyone has friends. Many people have the impression that others have more friends than they, and this is not neuroticism; it's true. After all, popular people have more friends than unpopular people, so they are overrepresented on everyone's list of friends, and people with few friends are underrepresented. People exaggerate the number of friends who drink and take drugs because these are social (i.e., networked) activities, and they underestimate the amount of non-networked behavior—e.g., studying. Social media amplifies this: 98 percent of Twitter users have fewer followers than those they follow. As a result, popular people exert a disproportionate influence simply because they appear to dominate our network. Jackson expands this to clearly reveal unnerving network effects in areas of our lives including journalism, public health, politics, economics, and the digital world. The wisdom of crowds is genuine. Given unbiased information, their conclusions are more accurate than any individual's. Of course, the stupidity of crowds is equally genuine. The internet has triggered a vast expansion of human networks, but because we prefer people with behaviors and beliefs similar to ours ("homophily"), the last 20 years have seen an explosion of fake news, political polarization, and ugly nationalism. However, we have seen much of this before. "Humans," writes the author, "have been rewired many times: by the printing press, letter writing, trains, the telegraph, overseas travel, the telephone, the internet, and the advent of social media. Perhaps it is our arrogance that leads us to assume that the current changes…are truly revolutionary and unique."

A mixture of delicious truths and ingenious sociological concepts that will convince most readers that we pay too much attention to the people around us.

Kirkus Reviews

Compelling. . . . Why can’t money buy you mobility? The Human Network is most fascinating and convincing in addressing this question. . . . Professor Jackson manages not only to present a lot of complex research engagingly but to show how the key concepts of network theory relate to a wide range of contemporary issues, from financial contagions to the spread of fake news.” —The New York Times

“Drawing on the academic discipline known as network theory, Mr. Jackson aims to introduce and popularize a powerful way of understanding some of modern society’s central challenges. . . . Mastering the many concepts Mr. Jackson introduces requires careful attention. But The Human Network rewards the effort.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A mixture of delicious truths and ingenious sociological concepts that will convince most readers that we pay too much attention to the people around us.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Networks show up as powerful forces in virtually every social science. The same phenomena appear in different disguises in different disciplines, but few scholars have the intellectual breadth to recognize these common behavior patterns, and fewer still have the ability to communicate effectively with a broad and diverse audience. Matt Jackson is one such person, and his book is a welcome introduction to this fascinating subject.” —Hal Varian, chief economist at Google

“Civilization depends on connections between people—on ‘the human network’—for trade, cooperation, and communication. In this beautifully readable and fascinating book, Matt Jackson shows that the science of networks can help answer deep questions such as why inequality and polarization arise, and how biological and financial epidemics spread.” —Eric S. Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Harvard University
 
“Much of what we do, and even quite a bit of what we think, is shaped by our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and increasingly our social media connections. This thought-provoking book explains how and why human networks matter so much, and why they can be a source of strength and fragility. A must-read.” —Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics, MIT, and co-author of the New York Times best-seller Why Nations Fail
 
“Spanning a rich array of topics, including the spread of epidemics and financial crises, political polarization, and economic inequality, The Human Network is a highly readable yet deeply informed survey of social life viewed through the lens of networks. Matt Jackson proves that he is not only one of the world’s leading theorists of network science; he is also one of its best expositors.” —Duncan Watts, principal researcher at Microsoft and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
 
“Matthew Jackson leads us through a brilliantly insightful tour of how the structures of social networks shape our lives and indeed our very humanity.” —Roger Myerson, Nobel Laureate in Economics, University of Chicago

From the Publisher