Matthew effect
The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, Matthew principle, or Matthew effect for short, is sometimes summarized by the adage "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". The concept is applicable to matters of fame or status, but may also be applied literally to cumulative advantage of economic capital. In the beginning, Matthew effects were primarily focused on the inequality in the way scientists were recognized for their work. However, Norman W. Storer, of Columbia University, led a new wave of research. He believed he discovered that the inequality that existed in the social sciences also existed  in other institutions. The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968 and takes its name from the parable of the talents or minas in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. Merton credited his collaborator and wife, sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, as co-author of the concept of the Matthew effect. The Matthew effect may largely be explained by preferential attachment whereby individuals probabilistically accrue a total reward (eg., popularity, friends, wealth) in proportion to their existing degree. This has the net effect of it being increasingly difficult for low ranked individuals to increase their totals, as they have fewer  resources to risk over time; and increasingly easy for high rank individuals to preserve a large total, as they have a large amount to risk. Etymology. The concept is named according to two of the parables of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels (Table 2, of the Eusebian Canons). The concept concludes both synoptic versions of the parable of the talents: The concept concludes two of the three synoptic versions of the parable of the lamp under a bushel (absent in the version of Matthew): The concept is presented again in Matthew outside of a parable during Christ's explanation to  his disciples of the purpose of parables: Sociology of science. In the 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. This was later formulated by Stephen Stigler  as Stigler's law of eponymy – "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer" – with Stigler explicitly naming Merton as the true discoverer, making his "law" an example of itself. Merton furthermore argued that in the scientific community the Matthew effect reaches beyond simple reputation to influence the wider communication system, playing a part in social selection processes and resulting in a concentration of resources and talent. He gave as an example the disproportionate visibility given to articles from acknowledged authors, at the expense of equally valid or superior articles written by unknown authors. He also noted that the  concentration of attention on eminent individuals can lead to an increase in their self-assurance, pushing them to perform research in important but risky problem areas. Education. In education, the term "Matthew effect" has been adopted by psychologist Keith Stanovich and popularised by education theorist Anthony Kelly to describe a phenomenon 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 lifelong problems  in learning new skills. This is because children who fall behind in reading would 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 Stanovich: Network science. In network science, the Matthew effect is used to describe the preferential attachment of earlier nodes in a network, which explains that these nodes  tend to attract more links early on. "Because of preferential attachment, a node that acquires more connections than another one will increase its connectivity at a higher rate, and thus an initial difference in the connectivity between two nodes will increase further as the network grows, while the degree of individual nodes will grow proportional with the square root of time." The Matthew Effect therefore explains the growth of some nodes in vast networks such as the Internet. Markets with social influence. Social influence often induces a rich-get-richer phenomenon where popular products tend to become even more popular . An example of the Matthew Effect's role on social influence is an experiment by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts in which they created an experimental virtual market named MUSICLAB. In MUSICLAB, people could listen to music and choose to download the songs they enjoyed the most. The song choices were unknown songs produced by unknown bands. There were two groups tested; one group was given zero additional information on the songs and one group was told the popularity of each song and the number of times it had previously been downloaded. As a result, the group that saw which songs  were the most popular and were downloaded the most were then biased to choose those songs as well. The songs that were most popular and downloaded the most stayed at the top of the list and consistently received the most plays. To summarize the experiments findings, the performance rankings had the largest effect boosting expected downloads the most. Download rankings had a decent effect; however, not as impactful as the performance rankings. Also, Abeliuk et al. (2016) proved that when utilizing “performance rankings”, a monopoly will be created for the most popular songs. Political science. Liberalization in autocracies is more  likely to succeed in countries with the advantage of a better starting point concerning political institutions, GDP, and education. These more privileged countries can also carry out key reforms more rapidly, and are able to do so even in areas with no initial advantage.