The Matthew Effect

In 1968 the sociologist Robert Merton published something uncomfortable about how credit works in science. When a famous researcher and an unknown one arrived at the same discovery independently, the famous one was remembered. When the two published together, readers assigned the ideas to the name they already knew. The known became better known, the unknown stayed invisible, and the gap widened with every round of recognition. Merton named the pattern after a line in the Gospel of Matthew: to everyone who has, more will be given. The finding has held up since, and later studies of authorship confirm it directly, showing that in collaborations between an established scientist and lesser known co-authors, almost all the credit lands on the famous name whatever the actual contribution was.

There is a detail in the paper's own history that makes the point better than the paper does. Merton's work drew heavily on the doctoral research of Harriet Zuckerman, then his graduate student, who had spent years interviewing Nobel laureates. She is almost never named as the concept's co-author, and Merton himself later said she should have been. The paper about credit flowing to the famous name did exactly that.

The uncomfortable part is not that this happens in science. It is that you are inside the same equation. Your first strong client made the second easier to win and the third easier still, because each one became evidence for the next. The first good job on the CV did the recruiting for the second. The first thousand readers pulled in the next thousand. And it runs in reverse just as reliably, which is why two people of similar ability can end up in different worlds a decade apart, separated less by talent than by whose early advantage started compounding first.

That gives you two things to do with it. When you judge someone by their track record, remember the compounding before you credit all of it to ability, because a record is partly a measure of skill and partly a measure of when the accumulation started. And when you choose where to spend your own effort, put it where advantage accumulates rather than where it evaporates. Some work leaves an asset behind, a reputation, a piece of evidence, an audience that stays. Some work is simply consumed. The difference between the two, repeated over years, is most of the gap.

Source: Merton, The Matthew Effect in Science, Science, 1968. The paper drew heavily on Harriet Zuckerman's 1965 doctoral research on Nobel laureates. Later empirical work, including Larivière and colleagues, confirms that in collaborations between an established scientist and lesser known co-authors, most credit is attributed to the famous name regardless of actual contribution.

The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis, 2016

On how reputation and recognition attach themselves to particular names in a field, and on the two psychologists whose collaboration produced much of the research in this library.