Matthew effect
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The "Matthew effect" denotes the phenomenon that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" and can be observed in various different contexts where "rich" and "poor" can take different meanings. The effect takes its name from a line spoken by "the Master" in Jesus' parable of the talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew:
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Sociology of science
In sociology of science, "Matthew effect" was a term coined by Robert K. Merton to describe how, among other things, eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous: for example, a prize will almost always be awarded to the most senior researcher involved in a project, even if all the work was done by a graduate student.
Examples
As credit is valued in science, specific claims of the Matthew effect are contentious.
- 20th century mathematician John von Neumann is frequently called the "father of game theory" or the "father of the computer", even though his influential publications were sometimes restatements of the ideas of his collaborators (see the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC).
- There was a controversy involving George Sudarshan and the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2005. Several physicists wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan-Glauber representation (or Sudarshan diagonal representation) in quantum optics, for which Roy J. Glauber won his share of the prize. Because the terms of Alfred Nobel's will restrict the number of Nobel Prize winners to three in a given year, the Nobel Committee has often been criticized for allegedly ignoring scientists who did seminal work on a topic while awarding a prize to other scientists for the same topic.
- In algorithmic information theory, the notion of Kolmogorov complexity (also known as Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity) is named after the famous Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. Li and Vitanyi, in "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" (p.84), write:
- Ray Solomonoff [...] introduced [what is now known as] 'Kolmogorov complexity' in a long journal paper in 1964. [...] This makes Solomonoff the first inventor and raises the question whether we should talk about Solomonoff complexity. [...] (Associating Kolmogorov's name with the complexity may also be an example of the "Matthew Effect" first noted in the Gospel according to Matthew, 25:29-30, "For to every one who has more will be given, and he will have in abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.")
- There are many uncontroversial examples of the Matthew effect in mathematics, where a concept is due to one mathematician (and well-documented as such), but is attributed to a later (possibly much later), more famous mathematician who worked on it.
- For instance, the Poincaré disk model and Poincaré half-plane model of hyperbolic space are both named for Henri Poincaré, but were introduced by Eugenio Beltrami in 1868 (when Poincaré was 14 and had not as yet contributed to hyperbolic geometry).
Education
In education the term Matthew effect has been adopted by Keith Stanovich, a psychologist who has done extensive research on reading and language disabilities. Stanovich used the term to describe a phenomenon that has been observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read: early success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows, while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of life-long problems in learning new skills. This is because children who fall behind in reading, read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers. Later, when students need to "read to learn" (where before they were learning to read) their reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. In this way they fall further and further behind in school, dropping out at a much higher rate than their peers.
In the words of Keith Stanovich (Adams, 1990, pp. 59-60): Template:Quote
Social policy
The term is also used in adult education to describe the distribution of adult learning across populations. In this case it refers to the phenomenon whereby adults who have the highest levels of initial education are most likely to engage in structured continuing learning, while those with the lowest levels of initial education are the least likely to engage in structured learning.
See also
- Bus bunching
- List of misnamed theorems
- List of multiple independent discoveries
- Positive feedback
- Stigler's law of eponymy
References
- Adams, Marilyn J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Bahr, Peter Riley. (2007). Double jeopardy: Testing the effects of multiple basic skill deficiencies on successful remediation. Research in Higher Education, 48, 695-725.
- Merton, Robert K. (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science (PDF). Science 159 (3810), 56-63.
- Merton, Robert K. (1988). The Matthew Effect in Science, II: Cumulative advantage and the symbolism of intellectual property (PDF). ISIS 79, 606-623.
- Stanovich, Keith E. (1986). Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy (PDF). Reading Research Quarterly 21 (4), 360-407.
- Stanovich, Keith E. (2000). Progress in Understanding Reading: Scientific Foundations and New Frontiers. New York: Guilford Press.
- Kay, Margaret J. (1996). "Reading: The First Chapter in Education." http://www.margaretkay.com/Matthew%20Effect.htm
