What is a good metaphor and a good analogy for this phenomenon?

October 21, 2006 5:54 PM

I need a metaphor and an analogy for an application of social network theory.

I am terrible at thinking of metaphors and analogies and now I need to create both for a proposal. I am using social network theory and social network analysis to explain the phenomenon of favors given (in both formal and informal ways) in adult life to and from classmates from Soviet secondary schools (15-20 kids together from age 11-18 all subjects, all day, every year). When they grow up they tend to hook each other up with jobs, etc., to put it simply.

So, now I need a metaphor and an analogy to describe an institutionally-created (i.e. non-family but informal) network where individual members benefit greatly from being in the network in a favor system.

Any ideas? ACK! And a special request, I like animal and nature metaphors and analogies!

posted by k8t to education (15 comments total)

Why do you need to create a metaphor for this? What you talk about seems like a particular example of the sort of networking (pardon the double use of the word) done by people the world over to get jobs, make business deals, etc. It's quite a common concept, and pretty much the basis of many conferences, frats, and (I say teasingly) business schools. By the way, that could be an especially nice system to look at if you have access to good data.
posted by Schismatic at 6:16 PM on October 21, 2006

I tried hard to think of an animal metaphor for this, but realised that I couldn't because all such networks in the animal kingdom (that I know about, anyway), are basically familial. Bees, ants, lions, apes etc all stick together, but they do so because they have evolved to cooperate with genetically similar members of their own species. I'd be interested if there are counterexamples.

Symbiotic relationships between different species are not really apt, either.

How about mountain streams which would dry up by themselves, but when they all get together they have enough water to make it to the ocean? A bit trite and lame, but that's what you get when you try to find natural analogies to uniquely human forms of behaviour. Good luck!
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 6:24 PM on October 21, 2006

Sometimes in scientific proposals, one is required to write a potential metaphor and analogy. Annoying, huh?
posted by k8t at 6:33 PM on October 21, 2006

Like the bees that find the flowers and then come back to the hive to inform the rest of the bees? And then they ALL get to eat?

As someone said, I think that the situation you're talking about is pretty purely 'human'; you can probably come up with an animal/nature metaphor, but I don't think it'll ever be precise enough.
posted by Kololo at 7:15 PM on October 21, 2006

the packrat phenomenon?
posted by krautland at 7:47 PM on October 21, 2006

I really can't come up with a metaphor, but the concept you are describing is called "Social Capital."
posted by arcticwoman at 8:58 PM on October 21, 2006

It's true that an exact metaphorical match is probably not going to happen due to the behavior's complexity, but there are parallel behaviors outside of human society. The closest analogy I can find for this behavior with animals is reciprocal altruism. There are examples of nonfamilial favors in a network of unrelated other members of the same species. Not exactly AnimalCorp Inc., but you gotta work with what you got.

The paper Evolutionary Psychology and the Social Sciences, by Todd Zywicki, Humane Studies Review Vol. 13, No. 1, seems to cover the basics relative to your question. A copy can be found here, but the original reference appears to broken at the Institute for Human Studies site. It's an interesting read, if only for the reciprocal altruism part, which is far more detailed that the sample quoted bits here.

'A third basis for cooperation in nature is "reciprocal altruism... In reciprocal altruism an individual provides a benefit for another in exchange for a reciprocal benefit, or the expectation of a reciprocal benefit in the future. Because the benefits are traded over time, however, at the outset one of the individuals must provide a benefit (thereby incurring a cost) in exchange for the mere expectation of a reciprocal benefit. By being the first mover, the party that first incurs a cost for another's benefit can be said to act altruistically...

De Waal defines three characteristics of reciprocal altruism:
1. The exchanged acts, while beneficial to the recipient, are costly to the performer.
2. There is a time lag between giving and receiving.
3. Giving is contingent on receiving.

[...Various paragraphs of educated blah blah blah...]

The instinctive nature of reciprocal altruism is illustrated by vampire bat societies. Vampire bats must eat every 48-60 hours or perish. Vampire bats feed on the blood of cattle and horses. These mammals are wary and large enough to brush off bats if they are noticed. Thus, substantial skill is required for a bat to locate prey and to successfully feed. In fact, on any given night, a large percentage of bats (especially young bats) will be unsuccessful in feeding, which would lead to a large number of deaths. To guard against this eventuality, vampire bats have devised a network of relationships where successful bats on any given night share excess blood with unsuccessful bats. Although much of this is sharing between kin, a substantial amount of sharing is between non-related bats.

Sharing among non-related bats appears to be driven by reciprocal altruism, or more specifically, a tit for tat relationship. Any given bat is more likely to share with a bat that has shared with him in the past than a mere stranger. Stingy neighbors are later rebuffed. See Gerald S. Wilkinson, "Reciprocal Food-Sharing in the Vampire Bat," Nature 308: 181-184 (March 8, 1984).'

[EOQ]

Woo hoo, vampire bats! Way cool, you can't go wrong with a vampire bat analogy this time of year, can you? And another of those undergrad types did a nice site covering the topic in prettier detail.

Bats freak you out, but you like the reciprocal altruism idea? How about baboons? A seminal paper on the topic by G.A Parker with the catchy title "Reciprocal altruism in Papio anubis" (aka olive baboons) appeared in Nature 265:441-443 (1977). No copies online I could find, but this paper condenses an on-topic conclusion: "olive baboon males will solicit help from an unrelated male in an aggressive interaction against a third male. It often occurs that on another occasion the roles will be reversed, and the original solicitor will help the same partner who is now the solicitor".

No baboons either? Zywicki's paper also says, "reciprocal relationships have been identified in species as diverse as vervet monkeys, sea bass, fig trees and fig wasps, baboons, chimpanzees, dolphins, and whales". We'll just leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Reciprocal altruism not close enough to your networking metaphor? Well, you got me; I'm out of ideas.

Standard disclaimer #834: I am not professionally (or unprofessionally) trained in this field. Somebody else reading AskMe almost certainly is. They are very welcome to leap in and correct, amplify, endorse, or challenge these remarks.
posted by mdevore at 9:05 PM on October 21, 2006

There was an article last year about the origins of altruism in Scientific American and there are a few instances where animals were used... perhaps it will be of use.
Article
posted by perpetualstroll at 9:46 PM on October 21, 2006

As a fellow scientist (and sometimes network theorist), albeit one never forced to write metaphors, I feel your pain. The best thing I can think of comes from raising social animals like rats or dogs. If you put them together young and raise them together, they form a cooperative unit. Introduce a new dog or rat after they are adults and you get a lot more competition and fighting.
posted by Schismatic at 11:06 PM on October 21, 2006

trade guilds, masons, mafia, fraternities, sororities.

For animal examples of such reciprocity (bats hunting for each other, cleaning fish, etc.) have a look at "The Origins of Virtue" by Matt Ridley, although many examples might be limited to families.
posted by meijusa at 2:07 AM on October 22, 2006

I don't have anything good for you (stand of trees, where one kind reinforces itself? bundle of twigs: you can break one but not them all?) but I am interested in this requirement to form analogies. This is a standard imposition? Can you give some pointer to guidlines with this requirement?
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:16 AM on October 22, 2006

You probably won't find one metaphor covering the typical human behaviour that you are dealing with. Metaphors are all pretty limited so it would be easier to look for several metaphors, each highlighting a particular aspect of cooperation in groups.

For example, you could use a flock of birds or a school of fish: an individual position in the group is dictated by the laws of fluid dynamics (how to profit from one another turbulence), and the overall group formation has also other benefits for every individual, like to avoid predators or minimize their impact.

Maybe the birds or fishes are related to each other (I don't know). But it has no bearing on the metaphore: the group dynamic is dictated not by kinship but by the laws of physics (turbulences) and environmental pressures (feeding grounds, predators, etc.).
posted by bru at 7:29 AM on October 22, 2006

As an inveterate reader of crime fiction, I'm afraid the first analogy that occurred to me was the rat king, used in Michael Dibdin's novel of that name as a metaphor for group co-operation:

'There's always a conspiracy. Everything that happens in society at a certain level is part of a conspiracy.'
'If everything is, nothing is. If we're all conspirators then there's no conspiracy.'
'On the contrary, the condition of this conspiracy is that we're all part of it. It's a ratking.'
'A what?'
'A ratking .. That's what makes the conspiracy so formidable. There's no need for agendas or strategies, for lists of members or passwords or secret codes. The ratking is self-regulating. It responds automatically and effectively to any threat. Each rat defends the interests of the others. The strength of each is the strength of all.'

Dibdin's point (in case you hadn't already grasped it) is that corruption is so endemic in Italian society that it is virtually taken for granted as part of normal social relations. This is probably too pessimistic for your purposes, but it does raise some interesting questions about the acceptable limits of reciprocal altruism, etc, that might be fun to play around with.

I'm very intrigued by your remark that 'sometimes in scientific proposals, one is required to write a potential metaphor and analogy'. I can understand why one might want to use a colourful metaphor to liven up an otherwise dry research proposal -- but 'required'? Can you elaborate? I'm interested in the rhetoric of scientific papers, but I've never encountered this particular rhetorical convention before. What's the reason for it?
posted by verstegan at 9:27 AM on October 22, 2006

Essentially you're looking for a type of animal that explores, does it's own thing, then shares it's knowledge(or helps out an individual member of the same pack) with the pack later. "Like a scout from a wolf pack finding good territory, they let others know where favorable opportunities lie."
"Like kittens of the same litter separated and reunited later still recognizing and assisting one another."(Note: I have no clue if kittens/cats actually do this.)

Also, while searching around for a half-remembered parable I was thinking of, I found this excerpt that claims Bonobos do favors for each other. If you follow up on that you might find a nature example in the research the author of that book gets this claim from.
posted by ElfWord at 12:09 PM on October 22, 2006

I like Franklin's exhortation to his fellow revolutionaries (at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, apparently): We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. Using it in a Soviet context might have some of the tartness of paradoxicality.

Bru's examples are nice, ethologists sometimes refer to the phenomenon he describes as 'the selfish herd.'

The British call what you're looking at "the old school tie" (I've never seen one, but there are actual ties, all silk) or "the old boy network" which becomes "the good ol' boy network" as it crosses the pond.

Following up ElfWord, aren't there some descriptions of male lion littermates taking on an alpha together, then maintaining the pride as coequals, perhaps even in one of Joy Adam's books?
posted by jamjam at 5:21 PM on October 22, 2006