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What Do We Learn from Our Networks?
How inequality affects networks
People generally don't think inequality is good, but they may think it is unavoidable. Other people believe inequality can be quite corrosive and negatively affect the health of a community.
Inequality is not the same as the visibility of inequality. In companies, when equality is high, visibility is not harmful. When inequality is high, visibility is harmful. For example, if the wage gap between the CEO and the employee is about five times, then everyone can know what everyone else is making. Everyone then becomes happier and more cooperative. However, if the CEO makes 500 times that of the employee, do not publicize the inequality. That is very corrosive.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Homo Narrativus
We, humans, seek stories.
We are essentially ‘story finders’ looking for meaning, narrative and shape in everything around us. We tend to not believe in improbable...
Bias Towards The Individual
Stories built around individuals provide relatability and a sense of being in the shoes of the people involved, living in the narrative.
Our tendency to give a ‘face’ and a story to a group or collection of people made us invent a dominant leader of the group, like the President, or the Team Captain, or the Monarch.
How Fame Alters Our Perceptions
- The popularity or fame of an individual or a piece of art (like a painting, song or a movie) alters how we perceive it.
- The characteristics and behaviour of the people among whom fame spreads matters more than the actual merit or quality.
- A study showed that more people liked the songs that were topping the charts, copying the behaviour of other listeners, and if the same songs were arranged randomly, they were not chosen or liked that much.
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Key Ideas
Network Effects
Network effects are the unseen forces that are guiding our destiny and exerting a powerful intervention on our lives, creating energy that escorts us down a path that is not always fully our intent...
Zipf's Law
Zipf's law is a mathematical probability that states that in a given set, the most frequently used data value (or word) is used twice as often as the next most common value. This is true in various statistical sets like income distribution in companies, internet traffic, phone calls received, and language.
One of the implications of this law is there are unconscious network forces and mathematical patterns governing our lives, with human beings just being nodes exchanging information.
Dinner Party Mathematics
When six to eight people are conversing at a dinner party, it is easy to focus on one conversation, but if the number is higher (say 15), then two-way conversations are more likely.
When groups get larger, the change is exponential, not linear, affecting one's social experience.