parents and coworkers. Within twenty-four hours of Parks’s arrest, word of her jailing and the boycott had spread to some of the city’s most influential communities-the local NAACP, a large political group, a number of black schoolteachers, and the parents of their students. Many of the people who received a flyer knew Rosa Parks personally-they had sat next to her in church or at a volunteer meeting and considered her a friend. There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly. Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize. When Parks’s friends learned about her arrest and the boycott, the social habits of friendship-the natural inclination to help someone we respect-kicked in.
The first mass movement of the modern civil rights era could have been sparked by any number of earlier arrests. But it began with Rosa Parks because she had a large, diverse, and connected set of friends-who, when she was arrested, reacted as friends naturally respond, by following the social habits of friendship and agreeing to show their support.
Still, many expected the protest would be nothing more than a one-day event. Small protests pop up every day around the world, and almost all of them quickly fizzle out. No one has enough friends to change the world.
Which is why the second aspect of the social habits of movements is so important. The Montgomery bus boycott became a society-wide action because the sense of obligation that held the black community together was activated soon after Parks’s friends started spreading the word. People who hardly knew Rosa Parks decided to participate because of a social peer pressure-an influence known as “the power of weak ties”-that made it difficult to avoid joining in.
II.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an established midlevel executive at a prosperous company. You’re successful and well liked. You’ve spent years building a reputation inside your firm and cultivating a network of friends that you can tap for clients, advice, and industry gossip. You belong to a church, a gym, and a country club, as well as the local chapter of your college alumni association. You’re respected and often asked to join various committees. When people within your community hear of a business opportunity, they often pass it your way.
Now imagine you get a phone call. It’s a midlevel executive at another company looking for a new job. Will you help him by putting in a good word with your boss, he asks?
If the person on the telephone is a total stranger, it’s an easy decision. Why risk your standing inside your firm helping someone you don’t know?
If the person on the phone is a close friend, on the other hand, it’s also an easy choice. Of course you’ll help. That’s what friends do.
However, what if the person on the phone isn’t a good friend or a stranger, but something in between? What if you have friends in common, but don’t know each other very well? Do you vouch for the caller when your boss asks if he’s worth an interview? How much of your own reputation and energy, in other words, are you willing to expend to help a friend of a friend get a job?
In the late 1960s, a Harvard PhD student named Mark Granovetter set out to answer that question by studying how 282 men had found their current employment. [231] He tracked how they had learned about open positions, whom they had called for referrals, the methods they used to land interviews, and most important, who had provided a helping hand. As expected, he found that when job hunters approached strangers for assistance, they were rejected. When they appealed to friends, help was provided.
More surprising, however, was how often job hunters also received help from casual acquaintances-friends of friends-people who were neither strangers nor close pals. Granovetter called those connections “weak ties,” because they represented the links that connect people who have acquaintances in common, who share membership in social networks, but aren’t directly connected by the strong ties of friendship themselves.
In fact, in landing a job, Granovetter discovered, weak-tie acquaintances were often
When sociologists have examined how opinions move through communities, how gossip spreads or political movements start, they’ve discovered a common pattern: Our weak-tie acquaintances are often as influential-if not more-than our close-tie friends. As Granovetter wrote, “Individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement can depend… on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the right time.
“Furthermore, such individuals may be difficult to organize or integrate into political movements of any kind… While members of one or two cliques may be efficiently recruited, the problem is that, without weak ties, any momentum generated in this way does not spread
The power of weak ties helps explain how a protest can expand from a group of friends into a broad social movement. Convincing thousands of people to pursue the same goal-especially when that pursuit entails real hardship, such as walking to work rather than taking the bus, or going to jail, or even skipping a morning cup of coffee because the company that sells it doesn’t support organic farming-is hard. Most people don’t care enough about the latest outrage to give up their bus ride or caffeine unless it’s a close friend that has been insulted or jailed. So there is a tool that activists have long relied upon to compel protest, even when a group of people don’t necessarily
In other words, peer pressure.
Peer pressure-and the social habits that encourage people to conform to group expectations-is difficult to describe, because it often differs in form and expression from person to person. These social habits aren’t so much one consistent pattern as dozens of individual habits that ultimately cause everyone to move in the same direction.
The habits of peer pressure, however, have something in common. They often spread through weak ties. And they gain their authority through communal expectations. If you ignore the social obligations of your neighborhood, if you shrug off the expected patterns of your community, you risk losing your social standing. You endanger your access to many of the social benefits that come from joining the country club, the alumni association, or the church in the first place.
In other words, if you don’t give the caller looking for a job a helping hand, he might complain to his tennis partner, who might mention those grumblings to someone in the locker room who you were hoping to attract as a client, who is now less likely to return your call because you have a reputation for not being a team player. On a playground, peer pressure is dangerous. In adult life, it’s how business gets done and communities self- organize.
Such peer pressure, on its own, isn’t enough to sustain a movement. But when the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they create incredible momentum. That’s when widespread social change can begin.
To see how the combination of strong and weak ties can propel a movement, fast forward to nine years
