Recognizing Social Capital in Social Networks: Experimental Results

Abstract

Social capital is an asset that has been positively linked to people's positions in social networks (Burt, 1992). Yet, what allows some people to shift into these positions has received far less attention. We sought to fill this hole in the literature by offering socio-cognitive explanations for why and how some come to occupy critical positions while others do not. We proposed and found that self-construal - or how people view themselves in relation to their social world - affects people's ability to learn and understand a novel social network. The greater people's cognitive ability, the faster they learned the network. However, self-construal attenuated the effect; cognitive ability mattered for those who had a more independent (i.e., less relational) self-construal, but had no effect on learning for those who were more relational in their self-construal. Given more time, those higher in relational self-construal (RSC) developed more accurate perceptions of the status and power relations in the network. The same was not true of those who were low in RSC. We discuss the implications for people's ability to spot opportunities for enhancing their social capital.