According Sachin Sarin and Reuven Dukas at McMaster University, inexperienced female fruit flies follow the lead of mated female fruit flies when selecting which fruit to lay their eggs.

Focal females (observers) that experienced novel food together with mated females (models), who had laid eggs on that food, subsequently exhibited a stronger preference for laying eggs on that food over another novel food compared with focal females that experienced the food alone.

As humans, we are constantly picking up cues from the people who surround us. Their behavioral choices influence our own choices, as demonstrated by the research work of Christakis and Fowler which shows that smoking cessation and obesity are directly influenced by your social network.

Christakis and Fowler present research that loneliness spreads through social networks. While this idea seems completely counter-intuitive, it’s a powerful insight. If you are lonely, you exhibit negative behaviors to the people within your network. In fact, having a friend who reports being lonely makes a person 52 percent more likely to feel lonely themselves. Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe presents a great summary of this research.

Loneliness, by contrast, seems to spread through an accumulation of encounters. Lonely people are, in general, less pleasant than nonlonely people: more impatient, more moody, more self-pitying. They have, in the language of psychology, “more negative affect,” and each unpleasant encounter they subject their friends to wears on those friends and taxes the friendship, until the friends themselves start to feel lonely, as well. Having more than one lonely friend only accelerates the process.

Female fruit flies take their cues from each other. Social learning allows females to determine where to lay their eggs. However, humans take their cues from each other too. Positive behaviors (and perhaps learned helplessness) radiate through social networks.

If you want to drive learning through your organization, then you must also understand your organization’s social network and the embedded social capital.

However, as we get older, we quickly learn that we do not need to test every single possibility ourselves. We can learn from others’ successes and failures.

Well, it turns out that animals can learn in very similar ways. Discover magazine reports on research where stickleback fish have been observed to learn to locate food by observing others.

I have spent a lot of time during the past couple of weeks considering the intersection of learning and social constructivism (which essentially represents learning from others.)

We often talk about teaching “best practices.” However, in the real world, complex situations rarely align with simplified models. Instead of teaching “best practices,” there’s a strong argument for applying the principles of carefully-constructed “error-exposure” training.

We need people to learn how to think and react to complex and rapidly changing situations where they may only have a few minutes to make decisions (or may be acting on partial information). More on error-exposure learning in the next blog post.

Have a great weekend!

604 people were surveyed about their friends. Then, seven years later, the participants listed their friends again. According to the study, only 48% of original friends showed up on the second list.

The study was part of a dissertation, so I have not been able to put my hands on the original text. However, some questions come to mind.

• How old were the participants? (College-age students will probably have higher turnover than middle-age folks (say the seven years between 35 and 42).
• How were “friends” defined? (Are we talking about “core friends who would bail you out of jail at 3 a.m. or acquaintences on Facebook and Twitter?)
• Were the particpants chosen by random sample?
• Were there any noticeable difference between sub-groups–such as gender or age?
• Would there be differences by socio-economic status or culture?
• What patterns emerge in tight-knit communities vs. open, migratory communities?

It would be interesting to conduct longitudinal research on these factors. Research on topics, such as this one, will allow us to make insightful observations on relationship patterns. My guess is that rather than a flat percentage, you’d see some individuals retain a tight core of connections for extended periods of time, while others will constantly build ad-hoc cause-based connections.

I believe we’d see substantial variation. Not everyone will follow a seven-year half-life. I’ll see if I can locate a copy of the dissertation and then will share more when data emerges.

First, the United States ranks near the lowest # of school-days per year.

• Japan–243 days
• South Korea–220 days
• Israel–216 days

Compared to those countries, the United States’ school year of 180 days seems significantly short.

Secondly, research that schools serve as an equalizer, preventing children from lower socio-economic status (SES) families from falling further behind. When school is out, these children fall further and further behind. High SES families can offer a wealth of summertime activities and learning opportunities that lower SES families cannot easily match.

It’s worth quoting from ”Are Schools the Great Equalizer“ (Downey, von Hippel, and Broh, 2004) at length.

although schooling does not equalize high- and low-socioeconomic status children in the absolute sense, and although schooling does not necessarily ensure that they learn at the same rate when school is in session, schooling does reduce the rate at which inequality grows relative to a world without schools.
To make this result more concrete, consider two hypothetical children with standardized
SES values of -.66 and 1.67. The low-SES child has a household income of $40,000; his parents are high school graduates who work as a bartender and a garbage collector. The high-SES child has a household income of $100,000; his parents are a nurse with a B.S. degree and a lawyer with a J.D.

Using estimates from our model 3, the SES difference between these children predicts a reading gap of 6.90 points on the first day of kindergarten, which widens to 8.44 points by the start of first grade. This widening reflects 9.5 months of divergence at the kindergarten rate and 2.5 months of divergence at the summer rate. In the absence of schooling, however, these children might diverge at the summer rate for all 12 months, in which case the gap at the start of first grade would be even greater—not just 8.44 points but 11.37 points. Although the gap does not close in school, it does not widen as fast as it otherwise might.

Today’s competitive global economy requires a commitment to lifetime learning that differs significantly from past learning systems–such as the agrarian little-red schoolhouse model in the 19th century and the public-school factory model of the early 20th century.

We need to instill the values of lifetime learning within our culture. Today’s high-value jobs require a commitment to lifetime learning, and that trend will only become more common in the future. More and more jobs will require people to learn new skills and adapt.

While many of us recall lazy summers as a joy of the past, it’s worth asking whether those lazy days truly serve the next generation’s needs.

If true, then it gives a strong argument for multitasking.

1. Define project #1 and give yourself a framework.
2. Shift to other projects for the rest of the day.
3. Sleep on problem #1 with good REM sleep
4. Return to problem #1.

There’s new long-term research that shows a layoff early in your career makes you more less likely to become involved with social groups throughout the rest of your life. Yes, one layoff can cause people to withdraw and stay withdrawn.

Specifically, people who were let go at least once were 35% less-likely to active within their communities than their continuously-employed counterparts.

Jennie Brand, sociologist at UCLA, based her research on a 45 year longitudinal study of 4,400 participants, and her research was published in September 2008 in the Journal Social Forces.

According to Brand,

“Workers who got flung out of their jobs during their peak earning years, between the ages of 35 and 53, were the most likely to withdraw from the social buzz throughout their lives . . . . being laid off doesn’t appear to be as socially damaging for older workers as younger ones,” Brand said. “The shame factor of downsizing your lifestyle just isn’t there, because your peers may be downsizing as well and you can play off your displacement as an early retirement even though it may be forced retirement.”

Tom Sander, in his Social Capital Blog, writes about “Only the Lonely Die Young” about current research on the health and behavioral choices of lonely individuals. Here are just two of many key points:

“Social isolation has an impact on health comparable to the effect of high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity, or smoking,” (quoting University of Chicago psychologist John Caciopo)

“That faced with a task of trying enough cookies to rate their flavor, on average, people who have been told that co-workers didn’t like working with them ate twice as many cookies as people who had been told that co-workers loved working with them.”

Layoff–>isolation–>individual health impacts

You won’t find these correlations in the daily news or in quarterly summaries of national GDP. Some people rebound quickly while other people withdraw (perhaps) the rest of their lives.

If you know someone who’s been laid-off (or have been laid-off yourself), consider these two statistics. What can we do to proactively weave people back, before they withdraw?

Leskovec and Horvitz, two researchers at Microsoft, conducted a planetary-wide study of MSN Messenger traffic for a single month (over 180 million users). They created a social graph of everyone who sent at least one message during the month. They found that the average IM “chatter” was 6.6 connections away from the furthest person in their network.

This study isn’t quite a replication study of Stanley Milgram‘s famous “small world” study, but presents a modern-age twist. When Milgram sent letters to Omaha, he gave the recipients a target person in Boston and asked people to “forward it to someone in your network who you can get this closer to the target person”. Milgram allowed people to use their full network.

I learned about this research through Thomas Sander, Executive Director at Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar (part of the Kennedy School of Government). He blogs on locally-based social capital–the Social Capital blog. If you have an interest in social capital, then i encourage you to add his blog to your “must read” list. He’s a lively, thoughtful, and engaging writer.

Are social networks like a fishery digital data, or muscles? It’s a complex question that vexes many people who examine about social networks and social capital. In order to even frame the question, we need to explore economic theory.

Let’s start with the fishery model. No one owns the sea or the fish within it. Certainly, some treaties define territorial waters and protect endangered species. However, after that, the seas are open to anyone for fishing. You just need a boat, some bait, and a crew.

Let’s say that you and I own fishing vessels. We leave harbor and start fishing in the same area. Neither of us own the schools of fish when they’re in the ocean. We toss our lines and bait into the water, eager to catch fish.

Both of our boats are successful. We catch fish. Once we bring the fish onto our boats, they’re ours. We get to enjoy the benefit of each fish we catch–whether we eat them or sell them at the fishmarket. So, we’re both motivated to catch as many fish as we can.

That’s great for us, but perhaps bad for the fishery. There’s a fixed number of fish within the fishery. If we (and other fishing fleets) take too many fish out of the ecosystem, the fishery will collapse. In that case, no one will catch any fish.

I’ve just described some aspects within an economic aspect of “the commons.” A fishery represents a commons because each fish removed from the ocean subtracts the number of fish, and it’s also very difficult to exclude people from fishing within a fishery. A fishery is a good example of a “common-pool resource.”

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shows there’s an important difference between a common-pool resource system and the resource unit contained within them. Here are a few examples of common-pool resources.

• A fishery resource system can yield fish;
• A forest resource system can produce lumber;and
• A river resource system can provide water for farmers to irrigate their land.

Of course, there are many other ways to enjoy a forest, ocean, or river. You could go camping or sailing. However, I’m focusing on ways that the common-pool resource systems can be depleted or resources.

If a social network works like a forest, fishery, or river, then two things must be true:

• It must be difficult to prevent someone’s access to the network.
• The benefits enjoyed by one person must subtract assets from the network.

In this model, we’re treating social networks as a resource system and social capital as a resource. If you withdraw social capital from the system, then it wouldn’t be available for others. You’d be taking social capital out of the system (like taking a fish from a fishery).

Here’s a simple example.

Let’s say I ask David for an introduction to Ambal. At the same time, three other people ask David for introductions or advice. David has a limited amount of time in his days (like the rest of us, we’re constrained within 24 hours). If David invests an hour to help me, then that’s an hour he could have invested with one of his other friends or family. My request doesn’t prevent David from helping other people, but it will be difficult for David to help them simultaneously while helping me.

In some ways, social capital is clearly time-bound. So, it’s tempting to say that social networks resemble fisheries.

But let’s not rush to conclusions. Let’s next consider if social networks resemble software code.

. . . “The average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed. Yet while that so-called college premium is up 40% since 1979, it is little changed according to Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal policy thinktank.”  Ip, Greg. “The Declining Value of Your College Degree” Wall Street Journal July 17, 2008.  D1.

College degrees provide one way to enter the professional workplace. Yet, at the same time, there’s an increasing number of people who are earning similar degrees across the world. Therefore, any college degree faces the risk of becoming a commodity.

College degrees carry a high financial cost–whether in cash or student loans, and they must be looked just like any investment. What’s the rate of return?

Change in median weekly salary by education level, 2001-2007, adjusted for inflation (source: same WSJ article)

• Less than a high-school diploma (-4.3%)
• High school graduate, no college (-0.8%)
• Associate degree (-1.2%)
• Bachelor’s degree (-1.7%)
• Master’s degree (-1.0%)
• Professional degree (4.0%)
• Doctoral degree (3.6%)

Think of it this way. If you had invested in a stock, would you be excited about one that had fallen behind inflation over 7 years? Essentially, that’s what you’re doing when you purchase an education. You’re transforming money (financial capital) into human capital (developing skills and experience through education).

Human capital isn’t enough to guarantee that you will get ahead. If you want to be successful, then you need more than just human capital. You need social capital.

• Formal support–support offered by official agencies, governments, etc.
• Informal support–support from core network (family and closest friends)

A friend of mine, who grew up in Appalachia, describes informal support as “as long as I’ve got a biscuit, you’ve got half.”

Post-Hurricane Andrew

In the post-hurricane environment, researchers found that people with high levels of education were more able to leverage formal support. However, they were much less able to leverage informal support. While “weak ties” might help you learn about disaster assistance and navigate through government paperwork, they won’t help you clean debris out of your yard.

Compare that to people with lower-levels of income and education. These people struggled to get formal support, but kin and close friends banded together to give each other informal support.

Economic Underclass

For years, we’ve heard that people find jobs through their weak ties (outside of their core network). That’s the core of Mark Granovetter’s research around managers. However, these expectations get wildly overturned when you look at people within an economic underclass.

Researchers found that a large percentage of the underclass “found their jobs through contacts who were either employed at the destination firm or used influence on their behalf.” (226) Researchers also found that opposite-gender contacts (gender heterophilous) were more effective than same-sex contacts for finding employment in this environment.

Key Ahas

Forms of social capital that may be useful in one environment may be useless or even harmful in another. (228)

Hurlbert, Jeanne S, John J Beggs, and Valerie A. Haines. “Social Networks and Social Capital in Extreme Environments.” in Social Capital: Theory and Research. ed. Lin, Cook, and Burt. Transaction: New Brunswick, NJ, 2007.