Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: The Strength of Weak Ties is among the most influential social theories of the past 50 years, however it has received mixed empirical support. In this paper, I investigate two possible explanations. First, through a meta-analysis of a diverse corpus of 56 social networks, I show that empirical social networks generally do not exhibit the idealized network structures from which the theory was derived. Second, using a simulation of information diffusion, I show that the theory's primary hypothesis -- that weak ties are especially useful for accessing novel information -- is unsupported when a network deviates from these idealized structures. I discuss how focusing on the strength of bridging ties rather than weak ties, and examining the independent roles of both bridgeness and strength, offer more promising alternatives.