Structure, Agency and Network Formation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

Transcription

1 Structure, Agency and Network Formation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective Jason Greenberg, NYU University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School

2 Hockey-stick growth in social network research Note: social networks keyword search (abstract OR title) in Jstor in sociology, economics, 2and business journals.

3 Increased appreciation and understanding of: Broad range of phenomena influenced by social networks Referrals, hiring, promotion Marketing Health Crime Community Boundary conditions/contingencies of social network effects E.g., direct v. secondhand brokerage 3

4 Two perspectives on the origin (and evolution) of social ties. 1. Strategic network formation (choice) 2. Social structural forces (constraint, chance) Propinquity Foci Homophily Triadic closure Preferential attachment Status Network autocorrelation 4

5 Comparatively little attention to actors and action, and thus how ties are formed. as the theory of action was applied to society, it appeared to have no actors and mighty little action. The reason was that it separated the personality system from the social system and proposed to deal with the latter alone. It was the personality system that had needs, drives, skills, etc. (Homans, 1964: ). 5

6 Let us get men back in, and let us put some blood in them. --George C. Homans (1964: 816). 6

7 The presenters: Presenter Siddharth Suri (Microsoft Research) Tanya Menon (OSU) Jason P. Davis (MIT) Adam M. Kleinbaum (Tuck) Disciplinary background Computer science/is (Penn) Organizational Behavior (Stanford GSB) Management Sci./Engineering (Stanford) Strategy (HBS) Methodology Experiments, agent based models Experiments Cases, simulations Empirical 7

8 Presentations. Speaker Sid Tanya Jason Adam Title Cooperation and Assortativity with Dynamic Partner Updating The Social Structure of Dishonesty: How Networks Make Liars and Liars Make Networks Network Agency Problems and Technological Innovation Do You Read Me? How Perceptions of Empathy Shape Self Monitors Brokerage in Social Networks 8

9 SUPPLEMENTAL SLIDES 9

10 What is agency? a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment) (Emirbayer and Mische 1998) 10

11 Cooperation and assortativity with dynamic partner updating Jing Wang, Siddharth Suri, Duncan Watts The natural tendency for humans to make and break relationships is thought to facilitate the emergence of cooperation. In particular, allowing conditional cooperators to choose with whom they interact is believed to reinforce the rewards accruing to mutual cooperation while simultaneously excluding defectors. Here we report on a series of human subjects experiments in which groups of 24 participants played an iterated prisoner s dilemma game where, critically, they were also allowed to propose and delete links to players of their own choosing at some variable rate. Over a wide variety of parameter settings and initial conditions, we found that dynamic partner updating significantly increased the level of cooperation, the average payoffs to players, and the assortativity between cooperators. Even relatively slow update rates were sufficient to produce large effects, while subsequent increases to the update rate had progressively smaller, but still positive, effects. For standard prisoner s dilemma payoffs, we also found that assortativity resulted predominantly from cooperators avoiding defectors, not by severing ties with defecting partners, and that cooperation correspondingly suffered. Finally, by modifying the payoffs to satisfy two novel conditions, we found that cooperators did punish defectors by severing ties, leading to higher levels of cooperation that persisted for longer. 11

12 The Social Structure of Dishonesty: How Networks Make Liars and Liars Make Networks Deviance is often assumed to thrive at the fringe of society. This paper empirically links ethicality with people s social networks, demonstrating bi directional causality. People primed to see themselves within dense (vs. sparse) networks cheated less (Experiment 1a), unless dishonesty benefited their groups (Experiment 1b). Experiment 2 reverses this causal link, finding that people randomly assigned to lie versus be honest cognitively activated sparser network subsections, an effect mediated by shame. These links between networks and ethics reveal how 1) Cognitively activated structural position fuels counternormative behaviors and 2) Unethical goals cause people to cognitively activate networks that pave the way for dishonesty. 12

13 Do You Read Me? How Perceptions of Empathy Shape Self Monitors Brokerage in Social Networks Social structure matters in organizational life, but our understanding of the origins of social network structure is limited. In this paper, we argue that to fully understand the role of personality in shaping social structures, we must better integrate the macrostructural perspective with the micro level perspective by emphasizing an intermediate level of analysis: the potential contacts of the focal individual. Our alter centric perspective builds on earlier evidence that the construct of self monitoring is associated with brokerage, but suggests that the effect of self monitoring on brokerage is amplified in those perceived as highly empathic. The mechanism that underlies this effect is the greater propensity of others to reciprocate the attempts at forging ties initiated by highempathy, compared to low empathy, high self monitors. We find support for these predictions in a study of the dynamic emergence of a social network among a complete cohort of MBA students. 13