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Editor Login
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Recent Comments
- Re: Control and causation
By: Kevin Williams
Date: Dec 2, 2005 10:14 PM
Notification
« Mobius on "Measuring Trust in Social Networks Through a Microfinance Field Experiment" | Main | Longitudinal data, causal inferences, and the institutional milieu »
1 December 2005
Control and causation
Following up on both the Mobius paper and my earlier passage on causation, how many social network related studies have incorporated a degree of control over some critical dimension of the network and/or other factors? In the Mobius paper resources, of a sort, were exogenously spread through the network, with certain paths facilitated (through lower interest rates for certain dyads) and their diffusion studied. In Festinger’s classic study on social influence, people were exogenously placed in housing. In Newcomb’s dorm study the students were exogenously placed in their rooms, and various measurements taken before they took residence. There are also small group lab experiments—Bavelas and colleagues’ work in the Small Group Network Laboratory at MIT in the 1950s—and social exchange theory—by Emerson and Cook and others in the 1970s and after. What other research has there been where there has been a degree of control? I interpret control pretty liberally here—e.g., where some exogenous proxy, correlated with communication, is used to examine the impact of the network. It’s an intrinsically difficult problem, since typically one cannot randomly assign certain types of relationships to pairs of people ("you two be friends"), but not insurmountable. If people have (1) ideas re particular research that did have a measure of control; or (2) ideas re how to achieve a degree of control so as to allow better causal inferences, please post a comment.
Posted by David Lazer at December 1, 2005 10:08 AM
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Comments
On Trust and Charlie Manson
First, I was relieved that Mobius operationalized “trust� not with the dictionaries as he intended, instead, as “willingness of an agent to lend money to another agent.� By drawing on dictionaries which often link trust with “integrity�, Mobius would’ve risked giving “trust� the positive spin it may not deserve. After all, one can trust Charlie Manson...trust that he’ll do the wrong thing every time (Gilbert, 2002).
Second, at the end of the talk, Mobius mentioned that more work will have to be done on the second type of trust he operationalized–specifically, “enforcement trust.� Instead of focusing on “type trust� as much, which involves an agent evaluating another agent based on what type of person he or she is, it would’ve been interesting to hear Mobius’ opinions on how powerful enforcement trust is in eliciting debt repayment and its interactions with social distance. Mobius implied that it would be easier to recapture your asset (loaned money) from a stranger, but he also gave a nod to the possibility that money loaned to friends or friends of friends would be more easily recaptured. Which possibility is more likely? One literature on reputational ramifications supports this latter possibility (Granovetter, 1985; Uzzi, 1997) and I would be interested in finding a literature supporting the former.
Very interesting talk!
Posted by: Kevin Williams at December 2, 2005 10:14 PM