popular mechanics

Popular Mechanics is a NYTimes article that addresses sociometry (think numerical analysis approach to social behavior… uber quant-sociology). A large part of this discussion is on social networks. Since social networks has been the recent star child of sociology, it shouldn’t be surprising that sociometrics is also interested in approaching it. Milgram did do the first numerical study of networks.


November 2, 2003
Popular Mechanics
By WILLIAM MIDDLETON

It’s 8:10 p.m. in the bar of the Four Seasons restaurant, its towering windows illuminated from below with dramatic red lights, and Gwen Stefani is making a move. With her sharply cut white pantsuit, pale skin, bright red lips and wavy platinum bob, she’s a rock ‘n’ roll Jean Harlow. Her host, Timothy Schifter, the chief executive of the accessory firm Le Sportsac, is guiding her through the crowd. Guests introduce themselves or wait to be introduced. An eager knot of people that had been clustered around her banquette seems to move with her. During her 27-minute tour of the room, she talks with magazine editors, fashion publicists, downtown stylists and uptown socialites. All eyes are fixed on her. A sociometric star is born.

Sociometry, little known outside the academic world, measures social encounters. Conceived as nothing less than what sociometry’s founder, Jacob Levy Moreno, called “a science of society,” sociometry is about people, numbers and behavior. Theoretically, it can confirm that, in fact, you are the center of the social universe — or merely a satellite. That is, if you believe that social environments can be understood by science. Social beings, after all, don’t always play by the numbers.

Cut to the Four Seasons, where Dr. David Gibson, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University, has agreed to apply basic sociometric principles to a New York party. He is up in the mezzanine, next to the D.J., looking down on the event. Two cameras are firing away. One, with a fish-eye lens to capture as much of the room as possible, shoots every two minutes. Another is zooming in on the sociometric action.

Sociometry was invented in the early 20th century by Moreno, who also, remarkably enough, founded group psychotherapy and psychodrama. While Freud’s work delved inward, Moreno spent his career looking out at the acts of individuals and groups. In 1932, after working with inmates at Sing Sing, he developed the first truly group-based therapeutic program and even coined the term “group therapy” at a congress of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia.

But it was sociometry that really captivated Moreno. At a correctional facility, the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, N.Y., he studied the interaction of residents, using his findings to make better housing assignments. He identified ideas like the social atom, which is the nucleus around any one person, and sociograms, complicated graphs that chart the connections of individuals.

The concepts of sociometry have evolved into a broad field called network analysis, a cross-disciplinary approach — think of it as Sociometry 2.0 — that incorporates hard science as well as fascinating work like the 1967 study by Stanley Milgram that suggested that the world is connected through only six degrees of separation. “Network analysis is what sociometry grew into as sociologists became interested in patterns at larger levels, not just people in small groups,” Gibson says.

Of course, sociometry yields more than just the kind of complex sociograms, or charts, that, he says, “as often as not look like a plate of spaghetti.” The information helps scientists to evaluate and improve “the kinds of things that sociologists care about: careers, values, health and so forth.” So is there any value to analyzing a New York party? Although Gibson seems to be missing — to lift a term from Moreno — a social atom (“I don’t really understand the human impulse to congregate in loud, crowded settings”), he is willing to give it a try.

The party, given by Timothy Schifter and his ebullient wife, Helen, is to celebrate the recent release of the new Le Sportsac line of bags designed by Stefani. With its coveted spot on the social calendar just days before the opening of New York fashion week, it’s like the fashion pack heading back to school. The party begins gradually at 6:30, with its first half-hour dominated by the host casually greeting his guests. At 6:54, Peter Arnold, the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, arrives. He moves around the room, speaks with a great number of guests and is out the door by 7:15. At 7:55, Stefani is led in (after an hour downstairs running the gantlet of television interviews) and seated on a central banquette. At 8:10, she begins a tour of the room that lasts until 8:37. At 8:43, she begins her farewells and leaves by 8:50. The event winds down and ends at 9:20 with a burst of Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything.”

With the party over, the sociometric work can begin. More than 300 digital photos are downloaded and sent to Gibson at Harvard. After making a thorough breakdown of the categories of guests, he rounds up some of his students to make a preliminary analysis, focusing on the predicaments that face every partygoer.

Issue No.1: Who should I talk to? With a total of 320 guests at the party, there are 51,040 possible pairs of people, or dyads, as they are called (for any budding sociometrists, the formula for computing dyads is N squared minus N divided by two). With such an extraordinary number of possible pairings, guests are faced with conflicting goals: the desire to engage with others versus the desire to seek out the most rewarding partners. “You can go wrong in either direction, jumping on the first chance to talk to someone and finding yourself stuck with the wrong person, or wandering around endlessly, looking for just the right person and being seen as a sociometric isolate,” Gibson points out. “So, early in the party we get this phenomenon, evident in the photos, of everyone stealing furtive glances around the room — settling only later into focused encounters, where they seem truly engaged.”

Issue No. 2: how to approach someone. Do I hurl myself at a guest, or do I stay in the social shadows and wait to pounce? The professor observes: “We see photos in which someone is lurking about the perimeter of a conversation, seemingly waiting for the best opportunity to assert themselves. The last thing you want to do is to step forward at the wrong moment, when you won’t be received enthusiastically. We can expect people to deal with this by gradually easing their way into the vicinity of whomever they’re looking to talk to, in the hope that that person will then do the actual initiating or, failing that, step in and start a conversation when the moment seems right. A student of mine, Freda Lynn, pointed out that this would be an ideal environment in which to examine how people weigh immediate opportunities against long-range objectives. If you don’t know who’s across the room, do you look in your immediate vicinity for a satisfactory partner or risk a long-distance hike with an uncertain payoff?”

Issue No. 3: Are you the center of the social universe or just a satellite? One sociometric issue is centrality (or, as we might have said in high school, popularity). Degree centrality is simply the number of people you interact with. Betweenness centrality is the contact you’re making with people whose only connection is through you. Prestige centrality, the most coveted, is the extent to which you interact with those who are most in demand.

“Because Gwen Stefani was the official center of attention, she interacted with a lot of people, and thus had high-degree centrality,” Gibson observes. “If we set some minimum time requirement on an exchange before we call it interacting, her degree centrality would drop substantially, for while she exchanged kisses with a lot of people, she had time to speak meaningfully with perhaps none of them.” Try not to become a sociometric butterfly, flitting but not truly connected.

And the King of the Social Jungle Award goes to: the images from the party show that Arnold, of the fashion council, through his brief but intense engagement, might even be more significant than the guest of honor. “It’s interesting that Peter is so often found to be talking — this wasn’t someone who was merely content with pressing hands,” Gibson says. “That he can be found to be having serious conversations means he’s probably more central than even Gwen in the ‘had substantial encounter with’ network. It’s not the number of people you know but the variety of nonredundant contacts you make — that Peter met with so many people isn’t as important as whether he met with a range of people, each different than the others in terms of their knowledge of opportunities, gossip, etc.”

The analysis confirms another interesting phenomenon: a late-blooming luminary. As the party winds down, a boldly dressed young woman in a bright red tank top, cropped black pants, spiky black hair and a silver studded black beret appears. A group of equally trendy young men and women surrounds her, and attention begins to shift in her direction. She is Annie Younger, one of the designers working with Stefani on her new line. “We don’t spot her until near the end of the party, at which point we find her with a number of young women who, like her, appear to be broadcasting their membership in the fashion crowd,” Gibson says, suggesting that he certainly knows a fashion statement when he sees one. “It’s possible that this is a sociometric formula for success: surround yourself with a densely interconnected, supportive group willing to give you their full attention, but don’t try to compete directly with the real big shots for attention.”

Although we may be onto something here (the posse approach to sociometric stardom?), Gibson is serious about the kind of analysis that could be achieved. The primary goal of further research would be to connect the events of the party with the background and future development of the guests. That might mean using a questionnaire to see if there is something in Stefani’s background that pushed her into the spotlight. It could chart a connection between the number of guests Arnold greeted and the size of his bank account or draw a parallel between the early sociometric stardom of Younger and her fashion future.

Not to take anything away from the professor or the discipline, but all the scientific analysis in the world can’t reveal how the magic of an evening is made, or the power of invisible forces. Take, for example, Helen Schifter’s involvement in the central event, the tour by Stefani. Seeing Schifter’s husband and the guest of honor sitting in their banquette, forcing guests to come to them, she swings into action. “I had to scream at them to get them to walk around,” Schifter remembers. “They were just going to sit in the booth all night. I said, ‘You have to get up and walk around!’ Everyone wants a piece of a star.” Especially a sociometric one.

William Middleton, a former editor at Harper’s Bazaar, is writing a biography of Dominique de Menil.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email