A causal test of the strength of weak ties
Rajkumar and colleagues report randomised experiments on LinkedIn's People You May Know suggestions, run over five years and involving more than 20 million members, to test whether weak ties increase job mobility. They report experimental causal evidence supporting the strength of weak ties, and they propose three revisions to the theory: the effect of tie strength is nonlinear, with moderately weak ties producing the most job mobility when strength is counted by mutual connections; the measure of tie strength matters, since the weakest ties by interaction intensity produced the most; and the effect varies by industry, with weak ties helping more in digital industries and strong ties in less digital ones.
Rajkumar and colleagues report randomised experiments on LinkedIn's People You May Know suggestions, run over five years and involving more than 20 million members, to test whether weak ties increase job mobility. They report experimental causal evidence supporting the strength of weak ties, and they propose three revisions to the theory: the effect of tie strength is nonlinear, with moderately weak ties producing the most job mobility when strength is counted by mutual connections; the measure of tie strength matters, since the weakest ties by interaction intensity produced the most; and the effect varies by industry, with weak ties helping more in digital industries and strong ties in less digital ones.
Written from the abstract, Science journal record.
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Rajkumar, K., Saint-Jacques, G., Bojinov, I., Brynjolfsson, E., & Aral, S. (2022). A causal test of the strength of weak ties. Science, 377(6612), 1304-1310. doi:10.1126/science.abl4476 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abl4476