Matthew effect (sociology) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

, the Matthew effect (or accumulated advantage) is the phenomenon where "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a catchphrase and proverb, frequently used in discussing economic inequality...

". Those who possess power and economic

Capital (economics)

In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process...

or social capital

Social capital

Social capital is a sociological concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. The concept of social capital highlights the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to get collective or economic results. The term social capital is frequently...

can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. The term was first coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton

Robert K. Merton

Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...

in 1968 and takes its name from a line in the biblical

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...

Sociology of science

In the sociology of science, "Matthew effect" was a term coined by Robert K. Merton

Robert K. Merton

Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...

to describe how, among other things, eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their 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.

Examples

As credit

Credit (creative arts)

In general, the term credit in the artistic or intellectual sense refers to an acknowledgement of those who contributed to a work, whether through ideas or in a more direct sense.-Credit in the arts:...

is valued in science, specific claims of the Matthew effect are contentious.

There was a controversy involving George Sudarshan
George Sudarshan
Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan , also E.C.G. Sudarshan, is a prominent Indian American physicist, author, and professor at The University of Texas at Austin.-Early life:...

and the Nobel Prize in Physics
Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...

for 2005. Several physicists wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan-Glauber representation (or Sudarshan diagonal representation) in quantum optics, for which Roy J. Glauber
Roy J. Glauber
Roy Jay Glauber is an American theoretical physicist. He is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona...

won his share of the prize. Because the terms of Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. He is the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments...

's will restrict the number of Nobel Prize winners to three in a given year, the Nobel Committee has often been criticized for allegedly ignoring scientists who did seminal work on a topic while awarding a prize to other scientists for the same topic.

The 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature,...

went for "The discovery and development of conductive polymers". In a classic example of the Matthew effect, inexplicably the Nobel Committee entirely ignored a substantial previous body of similar work while assigning discovery credit to prominent relative newcomers. Some of the earlier work (e.g., a conductive polymer electronic device http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/proctor) was even considerably more advanced than the Nobelist's. See conductive polymers for citations. Thus, Prof. Dr. György Inzelt at Eötvös Loránd University notes that, while the Nobelists certainly deserve credit for publicising and popularizing the field, conductive polymers had been " ..produced, studied and even applied " well before their work.. See controversy

The 1987 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was awarded to Robert Solow of MIT in major part for his discovery of what is now known as the Solow-Swan model of exogenous economic growth even though Trevor Winchester Swan published a complete and identical version of this model in the same year as Solow.

In algorithmic information theory
Algorithmic information theory
Algorithmic information theory is a subfield of information theory and computer science that concerns itself with the relationship between computation and information...

, the notion of Kolmogorov complexity
Kolmogorov complexity
In algorithmic information theory , the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object...

is named after the famous mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov
Andrey Kolmogorov
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was a Soviet mathematician, preeminent in the 20th century, who advanced various scientific fields, among them probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics and computational complexity.-Early life:Kolmogorov was born at Tambov...

even though it was independently discovered and published by Ray Solomonoff
Ray Solomonoff
Ray Solomonoff was the inventor of algorithmic probability, and founder of algorithmic information theory, He was an originator of the branch of artificial intelligence based on machine learning, prediction and probability...

a year before Kolmogorov. Li and Vitanyi, in "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" (p. 84), write:

Ray Solomonoff [...] introduced [what is now known as] 'Kolmogorov complexity' in a long journal paper in 1964. [...] This makes Solomonoff the first inventor and raises the question whether we should talk about Solomonoff complexity. [...]

There are many uncontroversial examples of the Matthew effect in mathematics, where a concept is due to one mathematician (and well-documented as such), but is attributed to a later (possibly much later), more famous mathematician who worked on it.

For instance, the Poincaré disk model

Poincaré disk model

In geometry, the Poincaré disk model, also called the conformal disk model, is a model of n-dimensional hyperbolic geometry in which the points of the geometry are in an n-dimensional disk, or unit ball, and the straight lines of the hyperbolic geometry are segments of circles contained in the disk...

and Poincaré half-plane model

Poincaré half-plane model

In non-Euclidean geometry, the Poincaré half-plane model is the upper half-plane , together with a metric, the Poincaré metric, that makes it a model of two-dimensional hyperbolic geometry....

of hyperbolic space

Hyperbolic space

In mathematics, hyperbolic space is a type of non-Euclidean geometry. Whereas spherical geometry has a constant positive curvature, hyperbolic geometry has a negative curvature: every point in hyperbolic space is a saddle point...

are both named for Henri Poincaré

Henri Poincaré

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science...

, but were introduced by Eugenio Beltrami

Eugenio Beltrami

Eugenio Beltrami was an Italian mathematician notable for his work concerning differential geometry and mathematical physics...

in 1868 (when Poincaré was 14 and had not as yet contributed to hyperbolic geometry).

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 (e.g. Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...

). 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.

Sociology of science

Examples

See also