Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

by David Burkus

  Within just eight hours, Zuckerberg had built a website that would put photos of two same-gender students next to each other and allow users to click on which one they felt was more attractive. As students were chosen, they moved up in the rankings and the program would compare them to other, hotter students. While the website instantly became popular, it didn’t go over very well with the whole community. After significant backlash that all but ruined his on-campus reputation, Zuckerberg pulled the plug and moved on to a new project. This one would raise his reputation to heights he had never imagined.

  Inspired by the popularity of emerging “social network websites” like Friendster and MySpace, and also “inspired,” as some would say, by a project he was hired to work on by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Zuckerberg and a collection of friends started a new kind of online social network. In January 2004, Zuckerberg registered the web address Thefacebook.com and started building. He and his friends had combined elements of Course Match and Facemash to create a service that invited individuals to create profiles of themselves, including personal information like hobbies, interests, and even romantic intentions. The service also featured a way to directly invite your friends via email to join as well. On February 4, 2004, the website was live and waiting to be discovered. They initially opened it up to only the Harvard community; an account could be created only with a Harvard.edu email address. Within Harvard, the service spread exponentially. By the end of February, 10,000 Harvard users had created a profile.18 And no wonder.

  As users joined the site, the service subtly encouraged them to email their friends and to invite them to join too, but only their Harvard friends. It didn’t take long for non-users to see their email inbox flooded with invitations, or at least appear to be flooded with invitations. As the majority illusion would predict, as soon as a few highly connected individuals had profiles on Thefacebook, it would suddenly appear as though everyone at Harvard was online—and that they should be too.

  Even if the majority illusion could easily explain it, the viral growth in popularity took even Zuckerberg by surprise. “Early on, we weren’t intending this to be a company,” Zuckerberg recalled. “We had no cash to run it.”19 But that initial and astounding success signaled something promising, and by the end of February they decided to expand beyond Harvard.

  Unlike a lot of similar websites, Thefacebook didn’t just open its doors to all comers. Where Friendster and MySpace were open to just about everyone who wanted to join, Zuckerberg and his team decided to expand in a relatively slow and controlled way, limiting who could join to college students at select universities. After Harvard had been dominated so easily, Thefacebook then opened up to Columbia, Yale, and Stanford by the end of February 2004. This deliberate one-college-at-a-time strategy was intended partly to resolve privacy concerns and partly to try to keep growth controlled. But as the majority illusion suggests, it might also have been the reason for Thefacebook’s amazing early growth. Within a week of February 26, the day the site was opened to students at Stanford, more than half of the undergraduate population had signed up.

  While it wasn’t their intention, and they likely weren’t even aware of it, the majority illusion was at work in Thefacebook, fueling its growth because of this campus-by-campus strategy. Rival online social networking websites like Friendster and MySpace, which were basically open from the beginning, worked pretty much the same on the surface. You would get an email invitation from someone you knew, you might or might not click on the email to visit the website and create an account, and then you would sign in and try to find friends who already had accounts. The difference with Thefacebook was that you weren’t looking across an ocean of humanity trying to find the few people whom you actually knew. Instead, you were just searching through an online representation of the real-life social network at your school.

  In addition, people were probably treating invitations to join Thefacebook differently. If your email inbox suddenly had four or five invitations to connect on Thefacebook, and these invitations were coming from people you knew were much more connected on campus than you were, your odds of joining the network were already much higher.

  The team at Thefacebook also put the majority illusion to work when targeting certain schools to expand into.20 In fact, their tactic looked like one straight out of Tim Ferriss’s playbook (or better said, Ferriss took from their playbook, because they were doing it first). If a targeted school resisted their expansion, or if a rival website had already begun to take root, they wouldn’t just compete directly. Instead, they would open the service up to that school and as many other schools in that school’s area as possible. For example, when they wanted to take root at Baylor University, they found that the school had a similar and homegrown service already in place. So Thefacebook suddenly opened up at the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas A&M, and Southwestern University to form basically a circle around Baylor’s hometown of Waco, Texas. The intention was to create outside peer pressure. Popular and connected students from their high school years would be able to reach out to their friends at Baylor and invite them to join. Again, the majority illusion would go to work, this time creating pressure not just to join but to eventually abandon the old service as well.

  Eventually, Facebook (now having dropped the “the,” and the front-runner among all online social network services) opened up to everyone, not just college students on specific campuses. But to give the majority illusion credit, this happened only after a huge number of users had signed on and the initial early adopters had graduated into the larger world. That critical mass of users was likely even large enough to keep up a majority—or at least plurality—illusion among tech-savvy twenty-somethings now in the workforce.

  Whether you are trying to sell a product or seeking the attention of a critical potential contact, the lesson of the majority “illusion” is exactly that: largely unknown companies, brands, and even people can appear to have big followings if they target the right early adopters. That illusion of majority preference then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and can turn the unknown into the well known.

  From Science to Practice

  The majority illusion is a quirk of perspective, but it’s one that can be hugely beneficial if you are trying to make a key connection. Individuals often look first to the most connected people in the local network to make quick estimates about what is popular and who is influential. If you are looking for an introduction to someone specific, the research on the majority illusion suggests that it is best not to rely on just one person you may know to make the connection.

  Instead, study the network around that target for other connections. See how many mutual connections you already have, and consider who among them may be the better people to ask for an introduction. You may still rely on just one individual to make a specific introduction, but you can also prepare other mutual connections by sharing your intent to connect with them and asking if they would be willing to put in a good word for you or at least say something nice if asked. In the end, if multiple people in a target’s close network are all talking about you, and if the most connected and trusted person is making the introduction, there is a much better chance that you will make the connection.

  Practicing Online

  In the social media era, the majority illusion becomes even more important. If you are a total stranger asking to be connected to someone who may be a key figure in your industry or organization, always expect that target person to do some research first and expect that research to be done online. You are probably going to get Googled, and your social media profiles are going to get searched, especially for mutual connections. Luckily, social media is also how you are probably going to find out the best way to connect with that person. Looking him or her up on Facebook or LinkedIn will show several mutual connections and that information is important for mapping out the network and how the majority illusion might be created. Importantly, it will also tell you if that illusion is impossible.
If you have no mutual connections and really have only friend-of-friend-of-friend pathways between you, then it’s likely that the time isn’t right to make that connection. Better to wait until your own network is further developed. (As you wait and grow your network, you might even find that the connection happens naturally.)

  For a downloadable template to use when completing this exercise, go to http://davidburkus.com/resources/ and look for networking resources.

  —9—

  Resist Homophily

  Or

  Why Opposites Rarely Attract

  We tend to assume that having a large and expansive network automatically means we will have a collection of diverse perspectives to rely on for information. However, recent research shows that people in networks tend to gravitate toward like-minded people and that most of the people we are likely to meet are already thinking like us. This means that simply trying to meet more and more people won’t work to give us the range of information we need in order to make better decisions and find better opportunities. In fact, this approach can even lead to making disastrous choices.

  ON NOVEMBER 8, 2016, Donald Trump shocked America.

  Well, Donald Trump shocked half of America.

  Sometime around 9:20 P.M., US Eastern time, the predictions of pollsters, data scientists, and media pundits changed dramatically.1 For almost the entire campaign season, including most of Election Day, the consensus was that Trump’s opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was going to win the election and become the country’s first female president. As the results started coming in from more and more counties, particularly those in the Midwestern “Rust Belt” states, Trump’s chances began looking better and better. By midnight, the forecasters who that morning had been assured of Clinton’s victory now gave Trump more than a 90 percent probability of winning.2 At 1:39 A.M., the Associated Press forecasted that Trump would win the state of Pennsylvania. The next moment, Nate Silver, founder of the politics forecasting website Fivethirtyeight.com and the forecaster who correctly predicted the outcome in forty-nine out of fifty states in 2008 and all fifty in 2016, replied to this news: “The AP has essentially called the presidency for Trump.”3

  About an hour later, Silver, who that morning had given Trump only a 28.6 percent chance of winning,4 would post on his website: “That’s a wrap. Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.”5 While Silver was careful to explain that the polling had shown a competitive race and that Clinton had a few weaknesses in the Electoral College, he called the result “the most shocking political development of my lifetime.”6

  To be sure, Nate Silver was not the only one who was shocked. The majority of forecasters had favored Clinton to win, and most with a greater assertion of certainty than Silver’s.7 Prediction markets had favored Clinton, as did the majority of public relations and communications professionals surveyed by PRWeek magazine.8 The New York Times claimed weeks before the election that Clinton was “poised to win easily.”9 Just a few weeks before Election Day, Harvard University professors were assuming a Clinton win and discussing how to “build an exit ramp” for Trump supporters, already tackling the challenge of de-escalating the blowback among Trump’s voters.10 Longtime Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi went even further, claiming as early as June and with great confidence that the Democrats would “win it all,” referring to Democrats’ chances of recapturing the Senate and earning more seats in the House of Representatives. Pelosi called candidate Trump “the gift that keeps giving to us.”11 Even inside of the Clinton campaign, the consensus on Election Day was that victory was a sure thing, and Clinton campaign aides were popping bottles of champagne on the campaign plane early in the day on Tuesday.12 It seemed like everyone was telling everyone else that Clinton’s victory was a sure thing.

  In the aftermath of the election, one of the most common emotions among those disappointed by the election results was sheer shock. “The outcome was so certain; how could the reality be anything different? How could we have missed this when everyone we knew was assuring a Clinton victory?” Some even went as far as to wonder how Trump could win when no one they knew had voted for him.13 Despite the shock and surprise, however, signs of a Trump victory were definitely present. They just weren’t noticed.

  The Clinton campaign even had warnings about the Rust Belt and about the state of Michigan in particular. But those warnings were so soft and so few that they were largely ignored. A week and a half away from Election Day, the Service Employees International Union started hearing reports of worry on the ground in Michigan.14 The union leaders decided to pull volunteers from campaigning in Iowa and move them to Detroit to shore up efforts there. But even as they were booking hotel rooms, the headquarters of Clinton’s campaign told them to remain in Iowa. The campaign team was certain they would win Michigan by five percentage points.

  Not that the entire campaign team was so certain, actually. Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s policy director, was the sole member of the inner circle who expressed concerns that she might lose.15 Sullivan tried often to convince the rest of the team to devote more time and attention to Michigan and the other Midwestern swing states. Sullivan’s concerns weren’t rejected . . . they were just ignored. The inner circle was too busy deciding what traditionally Republican states they wanted to add to their winnings. The overwhelming opinion of the network of Democratic campaigners was that Michigan, and the entire election, was in the bag.

  To be sure, most of the Trump campaign’s data and expectations pointed to only an outside chance of winning, but they were cautiously optimistic.16 But the race was certainly far closer than it appeared to a huge portion of the population. On the day of the election, RealClearPolitics, which keeps an aggregate of polls at both the national and statewide levels, was showing Clinton winning by only two Electoral College votes, and many of the states in the Democrat’s corner were well within the margin of error of polling.17 Clearly, many people were seeing only the result that they wanted to see.

  Perhaps the most famous Election Day prediction that turned out to be correct was from the liberal activist and filmmaker Michael Moore. Months before Election Day, before either Trump or Clinton had even been officially nominated by their party, Moore said in an interview, “I know that they [the Trump campaign] are planning to focus on Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That’s how he can win the election . . . If he can get those upper kind of Midwestern-type states, then he can pull it off.” A few months later, in July, Moore had strengthened his assertion: he insisted that Trump would win.

  His assertion proved true. Though it took time for the election results to be final, in the end Trump won Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Michigan. But how did Moore foresee this while so many others did not? For starters, Moore is from Michigan, and he still lives and works there. His early film work focused on the economic plight of the working class in Michigan and other Rust Belt states. While so many other pundits cited demographic and other changes that were making the Rust Belt working class somewhat irrelevant, Moore had firsthand experience of just how strong a force that blue-collar group could be in the general election. But his prediction was either not taken seriously or, if it was, discredited.

  In the shocked aftermath of the election, members of the American media began to wonder how they had missed the trend—and why people like Michael Moore saw it. Over time the consensus developed that, indeed, they didn’t understand how to interpret events and data because of their own isolation from opposing views.

  There were warning signs. Months before Election Day, New York Times columnist David Brooks (a conservative who still gave Trump little to no chance of winning the nomination) offered an explanation of why even Trump’s nomination was unpredictable. Brooks wrote, “We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough.”18 Brooks was the first journalist, but not the last, to acknowledge not being engaged enough with opposing sides to unde
rstand their viewpoints or to notice the signs of Trump’s campaign momentum. Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post, admitted, “We didn’t take them seriously. Or not seriously enough.”19 Two days after the election, CBS News political correspondent Will Rahn admitted that “we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.”20

  Meanwhile, Michael Moore had a front-row seat on what was going on in what he considered his hometown. Others were too geographically or ideologically isolated to harbor any doubt. But how could such isolation happen? Is there really a connection between where you live and not only how you see the world but how you think the rest of the world sees itself? The evidence suggests that there is indeed a strong connection. And it affects all of us.

  In the early 2000s, the journalist Bill Bishop and the sociology professor Rob Cushing began researching what appears to be an intriguing trend: neighborhoods were becoming increasingly more conservative or liberal.21 This wasn’t just people migrating to liberal or conservative states. Rather, this was happening inside of states, inside of cities themselves, where people appeared to be sorting themselves into neighborhoods based on their ideology.

  Bishop and Cushing both live in Austin, Texas, a fairly liberal enclave in a mostly conservative state. They began collecting data on presidential voting records and sorting it by county. Right away the evidence seemed to back up their hunch. Across more than 3,100 counties, a pattern emerged. From 1948 to 1976, Democrats and Republicans were fairly evenly mixed and over that period became even more so. But after the 1976 election, things got very different, very quickly. Migration patterns showed that people began to sort themselves out, and that Democrat and Republican counties began to emerge—they were growing more segregated.