PI: Arnout van de Rijt SUNY at Stony Brook
Sociologists have long suspected that a great deal of social inequality is inherited from the past, namely through a mechanism of success-breeds-success, or, "cumulative advantage." When a select group of individuals accumulates long strings of successes amongst large numbers of repeatedly unsuccessful others, this may well be because these fortunate individuals experienced small, random initial advantages that grew larger and larger through positive feedback, thus increasingly setting them apart from the rest. However, establishing that any given instance of social inequality is arbitrary is difficult, because once clear winners and losers are identified, it is easy to justify that differential success by selectively attributing it to certain hard-to-quantify personal qualities. This research incorporates an experimental strategy for compellingly demonstrating cumulative advantage that can be deployed live in many real-world situations where people seek some form of success. The experimental design is implemented in three specific live domains of success accumulation: financial gain, social status, and social support. In each domain, the experimenter selects individuals at random from a real-world population and bestows upon them money, status, or support through an internet-enabled transfer. Comparison of subsequent success with non-recipients provides a clean test of cumulative advantage. Further, from varying the amount of success bestowed in these experiments we learn how much past success translates into how much future success, which will be used to construct and parameterize formal models of cumulative advantage. These models, in turn, will be used to calculate how much inequality in a system is generated by cumulative advantage. The experimental strategy proposed will reveal whether a large portion of the variation in success across members of various populations is causally attributable to prior differences in success. A key feature of the approach proposed in this project is the application of a consistent experimental framework across different domains to test a common hypothesis and draw general conclusions about the dynamics of social inequality. This approach promises a qualitative shift in our understanding of how societal inequalities emerge and are sustained.
Broader Impacts The results of this research may suggest novel policy interventions specifically designed to rectify the effects of cumulative advantage by using the very feedback mechanism against itself. For example, the research may suggest that it would be possible to effectively jump-start projects by means of loans that are repayable through the proceeds that cumulative advantage generates. Further, much of the work proposed in the project will build links between the computer science and sociology communities by suggesting a collaborative framework that can be applied to other important sociological questions. Additionally, the project centrally includes the training and mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students.
