# matthew effect ![[kingjamesbible1772-matthew25(2)(cropped).jpg|300]] matthew 25:29 in the king james version the matthew effect sometimes called the matthew principle is the tendency of individuals to accrue social or economic success in proportion to ir initial level of popularity friends and wealth. it is sometimes summarised by the adage or platitude "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." also termed the "matthew effect of accumulated advantage" taking its name from the parable of the talents in the biblical gospel of matthew it was coined by sociologists robert k. merton and harriet zuckerman in 1968 the matthew effect may largely be explained by preferential attachment whereby wealth or credit is distributed among individuals according to how much they already have. this has the net effect of making it increasingly difficult for low ranked individuals to increase ir totals because they have fewer resources to risk over time and increasingly easy for high rank individuals to preserve a large total because they have a large amount to risk. early studies of matthew effects were primarily concerned with the inequality in the way scientists were recognised for ir work. however norman w. storer of columbia university led a new wave of research. ey believed ey discovered that the inequality that existed in the social sciences also existed in other institutions the concept is named according to two of the parables of jesus in the synoptic gospels (table 2 of the eusebian canons.) the concept concludes both synoptic versions of the parable of the talents > for to every one who has will more be given and ey will have abundance; but from ir who has not even what ey has will be taken away > i tell you that to every one who has will more be given; but from ir who has not even what ey has will be taken away the concept concludes two of the three synoptic versions of the parable of the lamp under a bushel (absent in the version of matthew) > for to ir who has will more be given; and from ir who has not even what ey has will be taken away > take heed then how you hear; for to ir who has will more be given and from ir who has not even what ey thinks that ey has will be taken away the concept is presented again in matthew outside of a parable during christ's explanation to ir disciples of the purpose of parables > and ey answered them "to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven but to them it has not been given. for to ir who has will more be given and ey will have abundance; but from ir who has not even what ey has will be taken away" # sociology of science in the sociology of science "matthew effect" was a term coined by robert k. merton and harriet anne zuckerman to describe how among other things eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher even if ir work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous. for example a prize will almost always be awarded to the most senior researcher involved in a project even if all the work was done by a graduate student. this was later formulated by stephen stigler as stigler's law of eponymy - "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer" - with stigler explicitly naming merton as the true discoverer making ir "law" an example of itself. merton and zuckerman further argued that in the scientific community the matthew effect reaches beyond simple reputation to influence the wider communication system playing a part in social selection processes and resulting in a concentration of resources and talent. they gave as an example the disproportionate visibility given to articles from acknowledged authors at the expense of equally valid or superior articles written by unknown authors. they also noted that the concentration of attention on eminent individuals can lead to an increase in ir self-assurance pushing them to perform research in important but risky problem areas **+** experiments manipulating download counts or bestseller lists for books and music have shown consumer activity follows the apparent popularity **+** a model for career progress quantitatively incorporates the matthew effect in order to predict the distribution of individual career length in competitive professions. the model predictions are validated by analyzing the empirical distributions of career length for careers in science and professional sports (eg major league baseball.) as a result the disparity between the large number of short careers and the relatively small number of extremely long careers can be explained by the "rich-get-richer" mechanism which in this framework provides more experienced and more reputable individuals with a competitive advantage in obtaining new career opportunities **+** a large matthew effect was discovered in a study of science funding in the netherlands where winners just above the funding threshold were found to accumulate more than twice as much funding during the subsequent eight years as non-winners with near-identical review scores that fell just below the threshold **+** in science dramatic differences in productivity may be explained by three phenomena: sacred spark cumulative advantage and search costs minimisation by journal editors. the sacred spark paradigm suggests that scientists differ in ir initial abilities talent skills persistence work habits etc. that provide particular individuals with an early advantage. these factors have a multiplicative effect which helps these scholars succeed later. the cumulative advantage model argues that an initial success helps a researcher gain access to resources (eg teaching release best graduate students funding facilities etc.) which in turn results in further success. search costs minimisation by journal editors takes place when editors try to save time and effort by consciously or subconsciously selecting articles from well-known scholars. whereas the exact mechanism underlying these phenomena is yet unknown it is documented that a minority of all academics produce the most research output and attract the most citations in education the term "matthew effect" has been adopted by psychologist keith stanovich and popularised by education theorist anthony kelly to describe a phenomenon observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read. effectively early success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of lifelong problems in learning new skills this is because children who fall behind in reading would read less increasing the gap between them and ir peers. later when students need to "read to learn" (where before they were learning to read) ir reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. in this way they fall further and further behind in school dropping out at a much higher rate than ir peers. this effect has been used in legal cases such as brody v. dare county board of education. such cases argue that early education intervention is essential for disabled children and that failing to do so negatively impacts those children a 2014 review of matthew effect in education found mixed empirical evidence where matthew effect tends to describe the development of primary school skills while a compensatory pattern was found for skills with ceiling effects. a 2016 study on reading comprehension assessments for 99 thousand students found a pattern of stable differences with some narrowing of the gap for students with learning disabilities in network science the matthew effect is used to describe the preferential attachment of earlier nodes in a network which explains that these nodes tend to attract more links early on. due to preferential attachment matjaž perc writes "a node that acquires more connections than another one will increase its connectivity at a higher rate and thus an initial difference in the connectivity between two nodes will increase further as the network grows while the degree of individual nodes will grow proportional with the square root of time." the matthew effect therefore explains the growth of some nodes in vast networks such as the internet social influence often induces a rich-get-richer phenomenon where popular products tend to become even more popular. an example of the matthew effect's role on social influence is an experiment by salganik dodds and watts in which they created an experimental virtual market named musiclab. in musiclab people could listen to music and choose to download the songs they enjoyed the most. the song choices were unknown songs produced by unknown bands. there were two groups tested; one group was given zero additional information on the songs and one group was told the popularity of each song and the number of times it had previously been downloaded. as a result the group that saw which songs were the most popular and were downloaded the most were then biased to choose those songs as well. the songs that were most popular and downloaded the most stayed at the top of the list and consistently received the most plays. to summarize the experiment's findings the performance rankings had the largest effect boosting expected downloads the most. download rankings had a decent effect; however not as impactful as the performance rankings. abeliuk et al. (2016) also proved that when utilizing "performance rankings" a monopoly will be created for the most popular songs according to resident amateur postmodern internet theorist robert what all privileged people of whiteness(tm) have to do is quote 'squeak-fart into an empty can of beans and they will instantly get 100k followers and likes' - with zero effort **+** ability grouping **+** attention inequality **+** capital accumulation **+** convergence **+** google scholar effect **+** the internal contradictions of capital accumulation **+** lindy effect **+** matilda effect **+** metcalfe's law **+** pareto distribution **+** power law distributon **+** positive feedback **+** preferential attachment **+** quotation § misquotations **+** social network analysis **+** tracking (education) **+** virtuous circle and vicious circle **+** wealth concentration // republic of bob