By Daniel Rigney
In his best-seller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularizes the phrase “Matthew Effect” to describe the circular loop through which initial advantage commonly begets further advantage. Self-amplifying feedback loops of this kind tend, other things equal, to create accumulating advantages, favoring the already favored and thus creating widening gaps between those who began with more and those who began with less.
Gladwell offers the example of enrollment in Canadian youth hockey programs, showing that children with earlier birthdays enter their programs with small but significant advantages in size, strength and maturity that contribute cumulatively to their later success on the ice.
The idea of Matthew effects, like the concept of compound interest which it closely resembles, is not new. The term itself was coined more than forty years ago by the eminent sociologist Robert K. Merton to describe patterns in the accumulation of prestige in scientific communities .
More recently, in The Matthew Effect (Columbia 2010), I reviewed several decades of subsequent research across a broad spectrum of fields, finding widespread evidence of such effects in social systems of all kinds, including educational systems.
Merton borrowed the phrase “Matthew effect” from a scriptural passage that is often loosely paraphrased as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” but this economic reading is misleading. In its original context, the scripture refers to the cumulative growth of spiritual understanding and the development of talents. Matthew effects have been found not just in economics, but in politics, science and technology, and education as well.
Matthew effects in education are pervasive. A large body of research in educational psychology finds that initial advantages in the acquisition of reading skills, for example, can pay big educational dividends later on. Young readers who begin in verbally enriched environments tend to read more, faster, and with better comprehension than those who do not, and are more likely to join social networks of friends who also read well. Thus their initial advantages beget further advantages.
Initial advantages in education seem to build on themselves and reinforce each other. Unfortunately, reading disadvantages may also be cumulative. Children who read slowly and without enjoyment are found to be more likely to drop out of school and less likely to find good employment.
We see similar educational dynamics in the acquisition of numerical and computer skills, conferring further advantages in life on the most literate, numerate, and “computerate” among us.
Educational advantages of this sort are not merely individual, but social and systemic as well. Consider the school as a social network comprised of vertical lines of authority and influence, horizontal lines of peer relations, and external links to other social networks, including other schools. Imagine, then, a vast network of networks, both human and electronic, and now international in scope, which connects schools to each other and to other kinds of institutions, from families and neighborhoods to corporations and governments around the world.
These larger networks, too, are organized somewhat hierarchically. Universities and colleges, for example, are often ranked in “tiers” to indicate their prestige and financial endowments relative to each other. Students who enter and remain in advantaged places in this vast educational internetwork will enjoy fuller access to Matthew effects.
With some work, some luck and a little pull through their social networks, those with favorable network positions can parlay their initial advantages into much larger advantages through life. They can invest their social capital (e.g., networks) and cultural capital (e.g., knowledge and credentials) in the accumulation of still more capital, whether in the form of money, power, prestige, knowledge, or any other scarce and valued resource.
Whether Matthew effects benefit or harm the common good may depend on the circumstances. Merton believed that such effects in the prestige systems of science sometimes did injustice to deserving but unheralded scientists while rewarding elite scientists for work that had sometimes been done by others. But he noted that prestige systems in science also serve to reward genuine merit and to help uphold standards of intellectual excellence. Merton concluded that, in this instance at least, Matthew effects have ambivalent consequences for the social settings in which they arise.
Should we intervene when educational policies clearly confer further advantages on the already advantaged while disadvantaging the already disadvantaged? This question is, of course, at the heart of disputes over a whole range of educational issues, from tracking to school funding.
Matthew effects are complicated. They may be ambiguously and simultaneously functional and dysfunctional for the social systems in which they arise. Their consequences are usually multiple and ambivalent, and are more positively functional for some than for others. Who should be the “some” and who should be the “others”? These are among the moral and political questions that Matthew effects pose for us.
A dispute has raged for years in my former home city of San Antonio over the legitimacy of “Robin Hood” funding for schools, which redirects some tax revenues from richer to the poorer school districts where the financial need is manifestly greater. This legal and moral dispute, which lives on in Texas and in many other jurisdictions, requires that we understand and address Matthew effects when advantages become self-amplifying and cumulative in the absence of intervention.
Should we and our institutions intervene to prevent the destructive consequences of self-amplifying loops of social and economic advantage? The Sheriff of Nottingham had one view. Robin Hood had another.
When I was growing up, Robin Hood was portrayed as a moral hero. Times have changed. It seems now to depend mainly on which side of Nottingham you live on. My own core values of fairness and equity for all children, and not just the children of the most advantaged, puts me on the side of Robin Hood.
Daniel Rigney is a sociologist and free-range writer in Houston. He is professor emeritus at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and author of The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage (Columbia, 2010) and The Metaphorical Society (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). E-mail drigney3@gmail.com.]
For more about Matthew effects by this author, see http://www.cupblog.org/?s=Rigney&x=0&y=0
and http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram/2011/09/05/what_are_matthew_effects#
In his best-seller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularizes the phrase “Matthew Effect” to describe the circular loop through which initial advantage commonly begets further advantage. Self-amplifying feedback loops of this kind tend, other things equal, to create accumulating advantages, favoring the already favored and thus creating widening gaps between those who began with more and those who began with less.
Gladwell offers the example of enrollment in Canadian youth hockey programs, showing that children with earlier birthdays enter their programs with small but significant advantages in size, strength and maturity that contribute cumulatively to their later success on the ice.
The idea of Matthew effects, like the concept of compound interest which it closely resembles, is not new. The term itself was coined more than forty years ago by the eminent sociologist Robert K. Merton to describe patterns in the accumulation of prestige in scientific communities .
More recently, in The Matthew Effect (Columbia 2010), I reviewed several decades of subsequent research across a broad spectrum of fields, finding widespread evidence of such effects in social systems of all kinds, including educational systems.
Merton borrowed the phrase “Matthew effect” from a scriptural passage that is often loosely paraphrased as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” but this economic reading is misleading. In its original context, the scripture refers to the cumulative growth of spiritual understanding and the development of talents. Matthew effects have been found not just in economics, but in politics, science and technology, and education as well.
Matthew effects in education are pervasive. A large body of research in educational psychology finds that initial advantages in the acquisition of reading skills, for example, can pay big educational dividends later on. Young readers who begin in verbally enriched environments tend to read more, faster, and with better comprehension than those who do not, and are more likely to join social networks of friends who also read well. Thus their initial advantages beget further advantages.
Initial advantages in education seem to build on themselves and reinforce each other. Unfortunately, reading disadvantages may also be cumulative. Children who read slowly and without enjoyment are found to be more likely to drop out of school and less likely to find good employment.
We see similar educational dynamics in the acquisition of numerical and computer skills, conferring further advantages in life on the most literate, numerate, and “computerate” among us.
Educational advantages of this sort are not merely individual, but social and systemic as well. Consider the school as a social network comprised of vertical lines of authority and influence, horizontal lines of peer relations, and external links to other social networks, including other schools. Imagine, then, a vast network of networks, both human and electronic, and now international in scope, which connects schools to each other and to other kinds of institutions, from families and neighborhoods to corporations and governments around the world.
These larger networks, too, are organized somewhat hierarchically. Universities and colleges, for example, are often ranked in “tiers” to indicate their prestige and financial endowments relative to each other. Students who enter and remain in advantaged places in this vast educational internetwork will enjoy fuller access to Matthew effects.
With some work, some luck and a little pull through their social networks, those with favorable network positions can parlay their initial advantages into much larger advantages through life. They can invest their social capital (e.g., networks) and cultural capital (e.g., knowledge and credentials) in the accumulation of still more capital, whether in the form of money, power, prestige, knowledge, or any other scarce and valued resource.
Whether Matthew effects benefit or harm the common good may depend on the circumstances. Merton believed that such effects in the prestige systems of science sometimes did injustice to deserving but unheralded scientists while rewarding elite scientists for work that had sometimes been done by others. But he noted that prestige systems in science also serve to reward genuine merit and to help uphold standards of intellectual excellence. Merton concluded that, in this instance at least, Matthew effects have ambivalent consequences for the social settings in which they arise.
Should we intervene when educational policies clearly confer further advantages on the already advantaged while disadvantaging the already disadvantaged? This question is, of course, at the heart of disputes over a whole range of educational issues, from tracking to school funding.
Matthew effects are complicated. They may be ambiguously and simultaneously functional and dysfunctional for the social systems in which they arise. Their consequences are usually multiple and ambivalent, and are more positively functional for some than for others. Who should be the “some” and who should be the “others”? These are among the moral and political questions that Matthew effects pose for us.
A dispute has raged for years in my former home city of San Antonio over the legitimacy of “Robin Hood” funding for schools, which redirects some tax revenues from richer to the poorer school districts where the financial need is manifestly greater. This legal and moral dispute, which lives on in Texas and in many other jurisdictions, requires that we understand and address Matthew effects when advantages become self-amplifying and cumulative in the absence of intervention.
Should we and our institutions intervene to prevent the destructive consequences of self-amplifying loops of social and economic advantage? The Sheriff of Nottingham had one view. Robin Hood had another.
When I was growing up, Robin Hood was portrayed as a moral hero. Times have changed. It seems now to depend mainly on which side of Nottingham you live on. My own core values of fairness and equity for all children, and not just the children of the most advantaged, puts me on the side of Robin Hood.
Daniel Rigney is a sociologist and free-range writer in Houston. He is professor emeritus at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and author of The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage (Columbia, 2010) and The Metaphorical Society (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). E-mail drigney3@gmail.com.]
For more about Matthew effects by this author, see http://www.cupblog.org/?s=Rigney&x=0&y=0
and http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram/2011/09/05/what_are_matthew_effects#
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