Why networks make people better

April 15, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Social brain, The RSA 

As I thought they might, the ‘why don’t you stop talking about politics and go back to running the RSA’ comments have started appearing. I’m happy to oblige by sharing some fascinating research – sent to me by Dan Jones (thanks, Dan!) on the relationship between altruism and social capital.

My friend and former colleague, Peter Kyle (who was at the other end of the spectrum of Special Advisors to poor old Damian McBride), has kindly offered to send a link to my blog to his members at ACEVO so I’m also hoping this is of interest to third sector leaders

The research – Human prosociality from an evolutionary perspective: variation and correlations at a city-wide scale by David Sloan Wilson, Daniel Tumminelli O’Brien and Artura Sesma –  explores what gives rise to what the authors call ‘prosociality’ (which they distinguish from altruism in that the former need not imply any self sacrifice while doing good). The research brings together social capital thinking with the perspectives of behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology to try to understand the context which makes pro-social behaviour a winning strategy for individuals and the human species.

In essence, the team from Binghampton University conclude that the stronger someone’s social networks the more likely they are to behave pro socially. The existence of these networks of support turns out to be more important even than income in determining people’s propensity to act benignly.

Like a lot of social research these findings confirm common sense while also having important implications. It is no surprise that people who feel they have support in their lives are most inclined to want to give back to society. But the research provides new research and a robust explanation at a number of levels (including game theory) for why supportive networks provide the context in which altruism makes sense.

I like the research because it forms a neat bridge between our Social Brain and our Connected Communities research projects. By understanding how we make decisions and how those decisions are governed by social incentives (both explicit and tacit) we can get to appreciate the best context to plant and cultivate the seeds of pro-sociability.

Some of the ways we form impressions about social support are fascinating. The researchers labelled neighbourhoods as socially supportive partly through a method in which addressed envelopes are dropped on the street; the proportion that is picked up and put through the right letter box is taken as a proxy for neighbourliness. It was found that people only had to be shown photographs of these more supportive neighbourhoods to become more inclined to make pro-social choices.

By explaining research like this to communities and by showing them existing patterns of networks (as we intend to in the Connected Communities project) we hope to motivate people to see the development of stronger social networks as a powerful good in itself.

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Comments

7 Comments on Why networks make people better

  1. carl allen on Wed, 15th Apr 2009 6:11 pm

    2. Prosociality and Networks at the top

    Since it is lonely at the top, is it to say that a major issue for benign leadership is that it is lonely at the top since no time is made for networking as versus spending time with the underlings. And too many of those close to the top regard themselves as underlings and not as contributors.

    By way of note, having occasionally spent time at the top, I find it to be an assumption that it is lonely at the top. An assumption thta has been drilled into and accepted by too many at the top.

    The assumption is that the top is a peak and not a plateau.

  2. carl allen on Wed, 15th Apr 2009 6:34 pm

    3. But since it is lonely at the top, is it to say that a major issue for benign leadership is that it is lonely at the top since little time is allowed for networking as versus spending time with the underlings. And too many of those close to the top regard themselves as underlings and not as contributors.

    By way of note, having spent time at the top, I find it to be an assumption that it is lonely at the top. That assumption has been drilled into the heads of too many, and curiously, accepted by too many at the top.

    The assumption is that the top is a peak and not a plateau.

  3. Matt Grist on Thu, 16th Apr 2009 9:56 am

    4. This research indicates that people feel and act the most prosocially where there are strong social relations and not too high a median income. In other words, too low a median income and too high a median income seems to reduce prosociality. So rich and poor can be anti-social, or at least ‘asocial’ (concerned chiefly with their own and nearest kin’s welfare).

    When we talk about greater prosociality I think the implicit assumption is that the working class be more like the middle class. This research shows that mixed neighbourhoods with middle class and working class populations are the most prosocial. Too much ingrained poverty and prosociality goes down. But too much wealth has the same effect. So when we talk about prosociality, we should make sure we talk about the affluent enclaves of the middle classes needing to change, not just the poor.

  4. matthewtaylor on Thu, 16th Apr 2009 1:17 pm

    5. Great point Matt. A new case for mixed social tenure developments? You should write a piece for Housing Today

  5. Dan Jones on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 12:56 pm

    6. I think another point driven home by this study, which is in many ways similar to Matt’s above, is that we should think carefully what we mean by the “quality” of a neighbourhood. Tony Blair, if I recall correctly, once said that everyone wants to be middle class, by which I took him to be making the reasonable point that most people do not want to be in poverty, but want to live in “nice” areas with good schools, would like to own their own home and car and be able to holiday once or twice a year, and so on. And this aspirational agenda, for Blair, was nothing to ashamed about (and I agree).

    However, such an aspirational agenda is often predicated on an implicit assumption: that if people are doing OK materially – live in semi-detached houses and drive a nice hybrid care, say – then good things will follow: when they live in the same areas, such middle-class folk will make for “good” neighbourhoods. But the research cited above suggests otherwise. Financial capital need not equal social capital, and high-income areas can be socially unsupportive, and thus asocial, just as low-income areas can. As the authors of the paper note, “the most prosocial students live in neighborhoods that are high in quality and low in median income—perhaps because, in the absence of financial capital, they need to rely more on social capital in their everyday lives.”

    So it seems that income isn’t really related to prosociality; at the very least, there doesn’t seem to be a straightforwardly positive correlation between the two, such that they inexorably rise together. But I wonder whether there might be a more complex relationship here, perhaps something analogous to the relationship between wealth and happiness. The answer to the question “Does wealth matter to happiness?” is both yes and no. When people are so poor that they cannot afford shelter, food, water and access to medical treatment, extra money can boost happiness by significantly increasing quality of life; however, beyond a certain point, about $25,000 a year, extra wealth matters less and less for reported happiness, and other factors become more crucial.

    Could something similar apply to income and prosocialty? That is, a certain level of socioeconomic deprivation – when people live on estates littered with empty beer cans and hypodermic needles, where windows are smashed or boarded up, drug dealing rife, and every available wall is spray-painted with insults, boasts and signs of gang affiliation – may preclude a sense of community cohesion and belonging that is required for prosocial sentiments to be nurtured. Yet once people rise above this level, and the basic conditions for the emergence of a prosocial community are met, then income matters less and other factors (as revealed by this study) come into play. It seems like a plausible idea (which may, nonetheless, be refuted by empirical evidence), and if true would be a powerful argument for providing increased assistance to the most deprived areas, and developing policies that ensure that as many people as possible are kept above this level*. This doesn’t mean that we should forget about encouraging the aspects of social support that matter once people are free of the shackles of extreme poverty (echoing Matt’s point about not focusing just on the poor), but that this should be an important element of a multi-faceted attempt to foster a greater sense of prosocialty among all citizens.

  6. £5 if you read this blog … | Matthew Taylor's blog on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 12:57 pm

    7. [...] this week I referred to important new American research on the relationship between social support and pro-social behaviour. The unsurprising but [...]

  7. matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 2:48 pm

    8. Thanks Dan. Great comment. Here’s what my old boss might have said: ‘no community is so poor that it has to put up with drugs, graffiti and vandalism – to say so is defeatist and self-fulfilling. The issue here is not the poor versus the very poor but poor communities that are orderly and cohesive and poor communities that have given in to gangsters and anti-social yobs.

    Now, I don;t go quite this far but I do think regenerations strategies have not looked hard enough and open mindedly enough about what networks of support exist in communities and how these can be strengthened and re-purposed at the same time as tackling the behaviours that undermine every one’s sense of community.

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