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Research Article

Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics

Arnout van de Rijt, Soong Moon Kang, Michael Restivo, and Akshay Patil
PNAS first published April 28, 2014; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316836111
Arnout van de Rijt
Departments of aSociology and
bInstitute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook, NY 11794;
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  • For correspondence: arnout.vanderijt@stonybrook.edu
Soong Moon Kang
cDepartment of Management Science and Innovation, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom; and
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Michael Restivo
dDepartment of Sociology, State University of New York, Geneseo, NY 14454
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Akshay Patil
eComputer Science, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794;
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  1. Edited by Karen S. Cook, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved March 28, 2014 (received for review September 10, 2013)

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Significance

Social scientists have long debated why similar individuals often experience drastically different degrees of success. Some scholars have suggested such inequality merely reflects hard-to-observe personal differences in ability. Others have proposed that one fortunate success may trigger another, thus producing arbitrary differentiation. We conducted randomized experiments through intervention in live social systems to test for success-breeds-success dynamics. Results show that different kinds of success (money, quality ratings, awards, and endorsements) when bestowed upon arbitrarily selected recipients all produced significant improvements in subsequent rates of success as compared with the control group of nonrecipients. However, greater amounts of initial success failed to produce much greater subsequent success, suggesting limits to the distortionary effects of social feedback.

Abstract

Seemingly similar individuals often experience drastically different success trajectories, with some repeatedly failing and others consistently succeeding. One explanation is preexisting variability along unobserved fitness dimensions that is revealed gradually through differential achievement. Alternatively, positive feedback operating on arbitrary initial advantages may increasingly set apart winners from losers, producing runaway inequality. To identify social feedback in human reward systems, we conducted randomized experiments by intervening in live social environments across the domains of funding, status, endorsement, and reputation. In each system we consistently found that early success bestowed upon arbitrarily selected recipients produced significant improvements in subsequent rates of success compared with the control group of nonrecipients. However, success exhibited decreasing marginal returns, with larger initial advantages failing to produce much further differentiation. These findings suggest a lesser degree of vulnerability of reward systems to incidental or fabricated advantages and a more modest role for cumulative advantage in the explanation of social inequality than previously thought.

  • Matthew effect
  • preferential attachment
  • scale-free networks
  • rich-get-richer effects
  • power law

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: arnout.vanderijt{at}stonybrook.edu.
  • Author contributions: A.v.d.R., S.M.K., M.R., and A.P. designed research; A.v.d.R., S.M.K., M.R., and A.P. performed research; A.v.d.R., S.M.K., M.R., and A.P. analyzed data; and A.v.d.R. and S.M.K. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1316836111/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

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Success-breeds-success experiments
Arnout van de Rijt, Soong Moon Kang, Michael Restivo, Akshay Patil
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2014, 201316836; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1316836111

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Success-breeds-success experiments
Arnout van de Rijt, Soong Moon Kang, Michael Restivo, Akshay Patil
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2014, 201316836; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1316836111
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