Why Does Success Breed Success? The Matthew Effect

If you ask successful people what the secret of their success is, they will probably mention passion, hard work, skill, focus, and good ideas. It is unlikely that anyone would answer: “advantage and luck.” We often fail to see these factors, perhaps because they do not make for as compelling a story. Yet we have repeatedly seen that advantages that put us slightly ahead at the beginning, and events that smooth the path, can shape or derail the course of a professional journey.

Robert Merton, the sociologist, showed in 1968 that in several scientific fields, advantages accumulate gradually. For example, well-known scientists, compared with less prominent peers who are equally capable, are more likely to be noticed and recognized again. Merton called this phenomenon the “Matthew Effect”[1], inspired by a verse from the Gospel of Matthew that says: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Merton’s focus was science, but the Matthew Effect appears in almost every area of society: from bestseller lists to sports leagues. Numerous experiments have shown that small, random, initial advantages can turn into major advantages. Success breeds success, and inequality generates further inequality; those who have gain more, while those who have little continue to be left behind.

A recent example of this phenomenon was provided by Arno van der Rijt, a researcher at the State University of New York, and his colleagues. They randomly distributed “small sparks of success” across four well-known websites. On Kickstarter, where people raise funds for specific projects, they selected 100 out of 200 projects and donated a small portion of their funding goal. On Epinions, a product review website, they gave a “very useful” badge to a number of newly posted reviews with no ratings. On Wikipedia, they awarded badges of recognition to a random group of the most active editors. And on Change.org, where users collect signatures for their campaigns, they added twelve signatures to 100 newly launched campaigns selected from among 200 campaigns.

In each case, success took a different form: money, approval from others, social status, and expressions of support. Yet these small initial achievements consistently led to greater achievements in the future. In all four experiments, those who had received an early advantage were far more likely to succeed again. For example, in the Kickstarter experiment, 70 percent of the projects that received that initial boost attracted more funding, whereas the figure was only 39 percent for the unselected projects. The fortunate projects received more than twice as much subsequent support as the others.

These effects were not short-lived either. Two weeks after the experiment, endorsed reviews on Epinions still had more positive ratings than other reviews. Three months later, the fortunate Wikipedia editors had also received more badges than their equally active counterparts.

Van der Rijt’s research also revealed another point: the returns from initial success diminish. The researchers repeated the Kickstarter experiment, but this time they gave some projects one donation and others four equal donations. Of the projects with no backers, 32 percent later attracted more funding; this figure was 74 percent for projects with one backer and 87 percent for projects with four backers. Thus, a small amount of initial success brings more success; but a very large initial success does not necessarily produce a much, much greater success.

The same pattern appeared on Epinions. A single “very useful” rating could raise the final standing of a review writer, but four ratings of the same kind did not have a dramatically greater effect. A small snowball becomes a large snowball as it rolls downhill; but a large snowball does not necessarily create a snow giant. What matters is that someone set the snowball in motion in the first place.

If this conclusion is correct, taking advantage of the self-reinforcing cycle of success through pressure and large-scale intervention will not be easy. According to the researchers, the vulnerability of reward systems to deliberate manipulation is likely to be limited mainly to interventions that help people who are unable to achieve their first success. For example, friends who introduce an unknown band to one another, or a charity organization that provides seed loans for overlooked projects; actions that merely start the engine of progress.

However, Duncan Watts, a researcher in social networks, warns that these findings may not be generalizable to larger issues such as career paths, social trends, or financial bubbles. He argues that randomly testing initial career advantages or spreading negative news about the housing market would be both impractical and unethical; therefore, obtaining empirical evidence in such systems will be difficult. For this reason, despite their usefulness, these websites are simple and specific compared with the complex systems that truly matter to us.

Nevertheless, the message of the study is clear: even with equal ability, some projects or individuals move ahead of others simply because of a small, random, and unseen advantage. What is another name for this advantage? Privilege and luck.

Someone might argue that this effect is not necessarily a bad thing in the real world; in these experiments, advantages were assigned randomly, but perhaps in real life they are distributed based on merit and reinforce small differences in quality. The problem is that we rarely have the opportunity to measure merit systematically and comprehensively. No one examines every Kickstarter project, and no one looks at every book in a bookstore before choosing one.

This does not mean that skill, interest, and hard work are unimportant; they are undoubtedly important. But such studies remind us that we should not view success as merely the result of the very qualities displayed on motivational posters, or assume that those who have not succeeded necessarily lack these qualities.

[1] The Matthew Effect does not take its name from Robert Merton, the discoverer of this concept. Rather than calling the phenomenon the “Merton Effect,” Merton drew attention to a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew that says: “To everyone who has, more will be given.” He saw that this sentence accurately described the very pattern he had observed in society and science: those who possess an advantage from the beginning often gain more opportunities and privileges as well. For this reason, he named the concept the “Matthew Effect.” Matthew is the same name as “Matti” in Persian, and the only difference is one of language.

Research source:

van der Rijt, A., Kang, S. M., Restivo, M. & Patil, A. (2014). Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics. PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.131683611