Early insight into social network structure predicts climbing the social ladder

While occupying an influential position within one’s social network brings many advantages, it is unknown how certain individuals rise in social prominence. Leveraging a longitudinal dataset that tracks an entirely new network of college freshmen (N=187), we test whether ‘climbing the social ladder’ depends on knowing how other people are connected to each other. Those who ultimately come to occupy the most influential positions exhibit early and accurate representations of their network’s general, abstract structure (i.e., who belongs to which communities and cliques). In contrast, detailed, granular representations of specific friendships do not translate into gains in social influence over time. Only once the network stabilizes, do the most influential individuals exhibit the most accurate representations of specific friendships. These findings reveal that those who climb the social ladder first detect their emerging network’s general structure, then fine-tune their knowledge about i..., , , # Early insight into social network structure predicts climbing the social ladder [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2280gb63t](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2280gb63t) ## Description of the data and file structure These data were collected to study how people's standing in their social networks (i.e., their network centrality) longitudinally depends on their knowledge about the social network's structure (i.e., knowing who is connected to whom, or what communities exist in the network). In this year-long study, we took six measurements of an evolving network of first-year undergraduates by asking every subject to rate their friendship status with every other subject. From these data, we computed two measures of network centrality (eigenvector centrality, which we also refer to as 'influence', and degree centrality, which we also refer to as 'friend count'). We focus on two relevant network measurements, one early timepoint in the Fall semester of the academic year, and one later timepo...,