Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics
- Departments of aSociology and
- eComputer Science, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794;
- bInstitute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook, NY 11794;
- cDepartment of Management Science and Innovation, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom; and
- dDepartment of Sociology, State University of New York, Geneseo, NY 14454
See allHide authors and affiliations
Edited by Karen S. Cook, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved March 28, 2014 (received for review September 10, 2013)

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.
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.