Very lucky to have been able to collaborate on this Annual Review piece on luck with @fabriberna.bsky.social, William Foley and @l-sage.bsky.social.
We propose that the role of luck in life can be upper-bounded with machine learning and lower-bounded by adding up causal effects of random events.
⏰ Early-bird registration for EUSN 2026 closes April 30, 2026. Still time to secure the discounted rate — register now!
A new paper w Manzo, Birkelund & Raub is out in Rationality and Society:
1/
journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....
Taking the opportunity of the 25th anniversary of the European Academy of Sociology (www.european-academy-sociology.eu), the statement assesses current challenges for the discipline ...
(4/5) This connects to important work by Karimi et al. (2018) showing that homophily and group-size imbalances produce disproportionate outcomes for minorities in networks.
They showed this for degree rankings; our results suggest the same structural mechanism extends to asymmetric media exposure.
Thrilled to announce CS2Nordics: the First Nordic Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, September 21-22, 2026.
We invite all CSS researchers in the Nordics as well as in the international research community to submit 2-page abstracts by June 19: nosocss.org/conference.h....
(2/5) We find that the minority (conservatives) were overexposed to cross-cutting media content through their network contacts, while the majority (liberals) were underexposed.
Content from majority-aligned outlets traveled across party lines; minority-aligned content largely did not.
(1/5) Starting point: when groups differ in size, Blau’s classic insight suggests that minority members form a larger share of outgroup ties — even when ingroup preferences are identical.
We test this for media exposure on pre-Musk Twitter (420K users, summer 2022).
(3/5) Ego-network simulations show that the observed asymmetry is reproduced when both groups have the same preference for ingroup ties.
Allowing preferences to differ does not improve fit, suggesting a primary role for population structure and a secondary role for differential networking behavior.
Arnout van de Rijt
📢 New paper with @pablobellode.bsky.social and @marckeuschnigg.bsky.social in Network Science.
We study how population structure can generate asymmetric exposure to cross-cutting media content in online networks.
doi.org/10.1017/nws....
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New paper out in Annual Review of Sociology with @arnoutvanderijt.bsky.social #W.Foley and @l-sage.bsky.social
"Luck and Predictability in the Life Course"
We take stock of what we know about luck and its role in shaping life-courses and inequality
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
The structural origins of the conservative online media niche, US Twitter 2022 - Volume 14
