PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Climbing the social ladder isn't simply a matter of popularity. Rather, people in positions of influence are particularly adept at forming "maps" of their social connections, which they navigate to become prominent in their social network, new research shows.
It's like having a "social superpower," according to study author Oriel FeldmanHall, an associate professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University who is affiliated with the University's Carney Institute for Brain Science .
"People vary considerably in how accurately they understand the structure of their communities," FeldmanHall said. "Our research establishes for the first time that people who excel at mapping out their social network — determining who belongs to which communities and cliques — are the ones who will go on to become the most influential in the social network."
The National Science Foundation-funded study was published in Science Advances.
Contrary to popular belief, being influential isn't determined by the number of friends a person has, according to the research team.
"What matters are your connections to other well-connected peers," said study author Isabella Aslarus, who conducted the research as a manager in FeldmanHall's lab. "These more powerful social ties give you a number of benefits that together add up to what we call influence."
Those benefits can range from being perceived more positively to influencing positive outcomes for others, according to Aslarus, who is now a Ph.D. student in psychology at Stanford University.
"Influential individuals hold sway over others' actions and are better at spreading information through their networks — a power that's been harnessed by interventions to reduce bullying and promote public health," Aslarus said.
Measuring influence
To understand how people ascend to influential positions, the researchers focused on a real-world, complex and evolving social network: first-year undergraduate students at Brown University.
"When students arrive on campus, they have no friends," FeldmanHall said. "But by winter break, they have a rich social world where many friendships have been created and other ties have dissolved.By studying members of the Class of 2026 living in three first-year dorms, my team was able to observe a brand-new social network as it developed."
Over the course of the academic year, the team conducted six assessments with approximately 200 participants who opted to join the study. At each check-in, they gave the students a "friendship survey" where each identified their friends within the study group. To track the evolving social network, the researchers created graphs of these developing connections.
People in the center of the graphs had the largest number of connections to other well-connected peers. At the edges of the graphs were those with fewer friends who also had fewer ties. By the end of the academic year, the researchers found that the students in the "influential" center spots were different from those who had held those positions in the beginning of the year.
How did those individuals move into positions of influence? The answer has to do with how they conceptualized their network, researchers found.
The research team gave students a second survey called a "network knowledge task." Participants were shown pairs of photos of fellow students and asked to identify whether they were friends. The responses helped the researchers measure the participants' knowledge about other friendships in the network, including those far removed from their own inner circles.
The researchers found that those who were "influential" by the end of the academic year had demonstrated the strongest knowledge of the network's evolving structure. They had a bird's-eye view of the communities and cliques within the network, above and beyond their knowledge of individual friendships.
"Participants often told us that it felt like they were just guessing who is friends with whom," Aslarus said. "But in reality, some individuals are remarkably perceptive of the structure of their social world, and over time, this knowledge enables them to end up at its center."
By Gretchen Schrafft, Science Communications Specialist, Carney Institute for Brain Science
