It seems like I've started seeing "the Matthew effect" everywhere, so I looked into what it means and who came up with it.
It seems like I've started seeing "the Matthew effect" everywhere, so I looked into what it means and who came up with it.
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Greetings Grammarpaloozians! Since we didn't have a bonus segment with Abigail Eisenstadt from AAAS, I wrote up a little something extra for you.
by Mignon Fogarty
I recently saw the phrase "the Matthew effect" at least five times in a really short timeframe after having never seen it before. The first time was when Kate Crist used it in our interview about literacy. (Podcast, Episode 1062) She explained it to me as "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer" — it's about how life favors those who are already ahead.
Then I read it in Adam Aleksic's book "Algospeak." You heard from him in episode 1117 back in September, where he used it to describe how content that is slightly better at capturing your attention will perform exponentially better on social media.
And then, I heard it used to describe the way AI that is putting together references tends to choose those that are already highly cited.
It seemed like it was everywhere, so I got curious and found that although it's not as new to the world as it was to me, it has, indeed, been on the rise. A Google Ngram search that shows how often words appear in books that Google has scanned shows that the phrase started showing up in the 1960s. Then it rises somewhat gradually until around the year 2000 and then really starts to take off.
The phrase was likely coined by Robert Merton in 1968 to describe findings that "highly productive scientists at major universities gained more recognition than equally productive scientists at a lesser university." Merton was a professor of sociology at Columbia University and published a piece titled "The Matthew Effect in Science" in Science Magazine.
And from this article, I learned of another phrase I hadn't heard before: "the 41st chair." This comes from the French Academy — and if you're a long-time listener, you know I love anything to do with the French Academy — so the French Academy honors the country's most important thinkers, and it has only 40 members at a time. So the idea of the 41st chair is that the person who would have been 41st if they had 41 chairs instead is probably at least as important as the people who ARE in the academy because 40 is an arbitrary cut-off number.
For authors, it would be the equivalent of having book sales that would have made you #11 on the New York Times bestseller list, but the list only goes to 10, so you don't get to say you were a New York Times bestselling author if you're number 11..
And Merton got the name from the Gospel of Matthew (25:29), which reads, "For whoever has will be given more, and they will have abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."
Writers in tech, education, and science use "the Matthew effect" as shorthand for a “cumulative advantage,” but you might want to define it if you use it since not everyone will know what it means.
And if you really want a halo, you can try to counteract the Matthew effect in your writing by looking for credible but less popular or up-and-coming sources, giving a little more attention to merit and a little less to momentum.
That's all, and thanks for being a Grammarpaloozian. You make a big difference, and I appreciate it.