Matthew effect

The Matthew effect, sometimes called the Matthew principle or cumulative advantage, is the tendency of individuals to accrue social or economic success in proportion to their initial level of popularity, friends, wealth, and natural advantages. It is sometimes summarized by the adage or platitude "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Also termed the "Matthew effect of accumulated advantage", taking its name from the Parable of the Talents in the Christian-biblicalGospel of Matthew, it was coined by sociologists Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman in 1968.

Early studies of the Matthew effect focused primarily on inequality in how scientists were recognized for their work. However, Norman W. Storer of Columbia University led a new wave of research . He believed he had discovered that the inequality in the social sciences also existed in other institutions. Later, in network science, researchers discovered a form of the Matthew effect in internet networks, terming it "preferential attachment". Researchers later reapplied the mathematics used for this network analysis to the Matthew effect more generally, where wealth or credit is distributed among individuals according to how much they already have. This has the net effect of making it increasingly difficult for low-ranked individuals to increase their totals because they have fewer resources to risk over time, and increasingly easy for high-ranked individuals to preserve a large total because they have more to risk.