Social Capital, The Currency of Community - with Mario Small
Dr. Mario Luis Small grew up in Panama City, the son of an architect in a tight knit community of other families. He learned first-hand the way that spaces and social connections shape well-being and community.
In this episode of Shared Space, I talk with Mario, Grafstein Family Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, about how his early experiences shaped his future work and his discovery around the importance of social capital, trust and social ties in strengthening communities across the globe, and specifically the nature of architecture and urban design to shape connection.
Dr. Small has published award-winning articles, edited volumes, and books on topics such as social relationships, urban poverty, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. He has amazing books, from Villa Victoria to Unanticipated Gains, to his latest book, Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice.
Episode Show notes
(Transcript from our interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)
Erin: When you were growing up, kind of think about a place of connection. What comes to mind?
Dr. Small: I would say the street corner. I grew up in Panama City in Panama and I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, where a lot of the houses on other side of my house and right across, were inhabited by people who had also just moved into the neighborhood. It was a brand-new neighborhood, and everybody had boys. Because of gender norms at the time in Panama, boys were allowed out in the street at all hours, far more than girls. In my neighborhood, on my block, there were always a lot of boys just hanging out. There was a corner just two houses down from mine, an intersection, a T actually, and we spent a lot of time there. It was a dead-end street, and there were not a lot of cars there because you know, you weren't going there, unless you lived there. We spent a lot of time there, from age five until seventeen.
Imagine a very high-density neighborhood with one-story houses that have two or three bedrooms and one or two paths in very small lots. I could literally hear my neighbors on the phone when they were speaking on the telephone. So, it's a very, very tight knit group. We also spent a lot of time on each other's porches when it was hot inside, playing board games. A lot of it was literally sitting on the curb, on the street and playing soccer. It evolved, from first playing tag, then playing hide and seek to then playing soccer and basketball all in the same street.
Erin: What is social capital and why is it so important?
Dr. Small: You can think of social capital as all the resources you have access to by virtue of your networks. You can think about social capital as something that you as a person have, or something that a community or even a country has. If you think about the social capital of a community, you're thinking about all of the things that the community has, that allows it to get things done because of the nature of its networks, for example, a high level of trust. If there's a high level of trust, people can get a lot of things done very quickly, and more efficiently than in communities where there's not a lot of trust.
As an individual, social capital is analogously all of the things that you as a person have access to because of your networks. For example, you're looking for a job, if you can get information about good jobs for your networks, that means you have a lot of social capital in your networks and that particular form of social capital is information. If you have a lot of people you can trust and in emergencies, you know, you need to give somebody the keys to your house, or you need to give somebody access to something really personal or whatever it is, having that social capital can make you fulfill your needs or your goals a lot more effectively and efficiently.
Erin: One of the things that you kind of talk about is bridging versus bonding ties. Could you just say a few words about that too?
Dr. Small: It's a distinction that's been around for some time. The idea of bonding social capital is the kind of social capital that comes from community in which people have a lot in common. It is often associated with a lot of trust, with a lot of sense of community, a lot of sense of belonging. So, you can imagine that being part of a community like that can sort of give you a good sense of wellbeing. Having people, you can bond and connect to in that way, that kind of social capital is valuable. The idea of bridging social capital typically or often refers to connections to people who are very different from you. It is a bridge to other communities. What's useful about that idea is that, you know, the people who are most useful for certain kinds of things and not necessarily the people who are most similar to you, they can be the people who are most different from you. They are the ones who are most likely to know something you don't already know, to be connected to people you're not already connected to, to have access to resources you don't already have access to, and that's how people think about that distinction.
Erin: So, I think you started to touch on it, but can you talk about how these different types of social ties or just how social ties in general are impacting our health and our overall wellbeing.
Dr. Small: The general way of thinking about these questions, which I think too often is ignored the importance of space. There's overwhelming evidence that your connections matter to your wellbeing. For example, we do know that people who feel loneliness, the sense that you are not connected to those around you, the sense that you do not have a lot of friends, and so on. That feeling is associated with both mental and physical health outcomes. Lonelier people die sooner. John Cacioppo has a great book on loneliness (Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection). There's also the sort of the importance of things that are not necessarily just loneliness, but connections.
Think about loneliness as the feeling, literally just what you feel in your head and, think about connections, that's what you have objectively. Some people don't know that many people, they have two or three friends, but they don't feel lonely at all, and that can be good. Ten people they run into regularly, but they feel lonely anyway. So, the impacts of loneliness and the impacts of objective connections both matter, it just matter differently. You know, everybody has had a different experience with COVID. I mean, there's nobody who has not been affected. A lot of people have been affected drastically by the physical distancing and the social isolation, meaning before they were in one of the many offices, restaurants, office buildings, university schools, where they ran into people. Think about kids in schools, they ran into people on a regular basis everyday. Now for a year now or close to a year, they have essentially been at home, using technology to try to engage with people in the same way they were before.
I think one of the things that's become clear is that Zoom classes can not replace the full school experience that a child goes through, or teenagers go through when they're in a school, go into the cafeteria, interacting with people in the hallways, see their classmates react to a lecture and interact. Online life does not replace for all of us what we had in the physical space context. I think a lot of what we have lost, a lot of the grief that a lot of people experienced has to do with those interpersonal, physical contact--physical in the sense of presence, that we all had and many of us took for granted. I can give you some examples in the context of work. Suppose that, you know, before you worked in some space where you had to interact with others and now you work from home, and you are one of the fortunate people who can have still has a job. if you're like many people there might've been a period where you're like, oh my goodness, this is the best thing ever, and it's so productive.
However, that's no longer the case for many people. Here's what you lose; you lose the opportunity to run into strangers. Why does that matter? Because it turns out a lot of the reasons, we ended up feeling that we belong in a community is because we normally run into others. One of the things I've found in a recent book is that people are willing to confide a lot of personal things to people that are not that close to them. That happens a lot at work. You think about the water cooler conversation--there's a big difference between the water cooler and the fridge conversation. There's a big difference between the water cooler and the fridge. You know, you can go to your fridge and have a glass of water, but it's just not the same thing. You're participating in a community with others, so it feels like we're part of a community.
Erin: I think so often about social dynamics that are as that double-edged giving. I've heard you talk about how yes, if you have a tie, that person is going to be helpful to you, helping to support you. Chances are, you're also beholden to them and I hear us becoming more individualistic, but at the same time, this recent kind of backlash of like, self care. We can't just care for ourselves; we need to care for each other.
Dr. Small: What's interesting about the pandemic is that it's provided several different instances and opportunities for doing this. So, you might remember early in the mask conversation and a lot of the messaging by authorities, nationally and internationally was very messy around this. But a lot of the discussion was about whether it helps you or it helps others for you to wear a mask. I remember being in some research teams, where a lot of what we were debating, whether messaging focused on ‘what masks will do to you versus messaging focused on what mask do to others’ was more effective. A lot of people thought that you got to talk to them about themselves, otherwise nobody's going to do it.
Erin: My question, I had wondered that so much, that was constantly going through my mind, like, who's studying this answer?
Dr. Small: We did it, but this was early. We did it right as the pandemic was starting. So, there was a lot of conflicting messages. We don't know if we're picking up reality or like what was coming through the media and how that was modeling the results. If you think more broadly, you know, you're totally right. I love that you pointed this idea that the self-care narrative, of course, it's important, that you want to think about self care and so on. Self care is important in many communities and individuals who've not prioritized self care. In fact, the absence of prioritizing self care, there's now good evidence suggesting that in heterosexual households with children has primarily affected women. The productivity among women in that category has dramatically dropped and it's not dropping the same. I measured in a whole bunch of ways. I think it is important, to bring it to light but at the same time it's very easy to focus on the ‘self’ part of the self care part, as opposed to the ‘care’ part. Think about when you're in the presence of others, it is easier to give up when you're just by yourself all the time.
Erin: Throughout this pandemic, how the nature of our social connections have changed? I've heard so many people posit their personal experiences, which are wonderful, but what is the emerging data saying?
Dr. Small: The answer is--it's not clear. I know it's very annoying, but I can promise, I can give you something a little more concrete that we don't know yet. I'll give you some examples of things that we thought were going to change, that we found haven't changed that much yet. So, one of the things that happened after the pandemic started was the George Floyd murders and Brianna Taylor and massive protests that followed. It turns out that right before the Floyd incident, I had launched a pilot study where we were interviewing a sample of women of any race, of African Americans of any gender, and Asian and Asian Americans of any gender. There were three groups about whom they talked to, about their personal experiences with discrimination.
Then, right after the murders, it was like a huge awakening. Everybody talked about the importance of fighting discrimination and large-scale companies all over the place felt compelled to post statements and it was really everywhere about more equity and so on. You couldn't turn open a newspaper in anywhere in the country, everybody made some kind of statement, and it was out there. The big protest with everybody going out on the street was not unrelated to COVID, these happened just by coincidence, three months after people had been locked up and totally physically distanced. They were frustrated about this anyway, I mean, I'm not saying there's a motivation just logically, you know, it's a kind of condition where you would expect something like that to happen. We did a follow up about five weeks after, and so we did the same thing. We haven't written this up yet, we're working on it right now. So, this is not something that's public yet. Actually, this is the first time I've talked about it. We found almost ‘no’ difference.
I thought there was going to be a change in the number of people who had these experiences, who they talk to, the composition of the people they talk to, the probability that they would talk to others about it. There almost, almost nothing. The only thing that is tiny little bit more is the proportion of people, who said that they experienced discrimination in one or another form, tiny impact, but in terms of how we relate to our networks around something, I thought would be so very little change. That's one way in which you can say that this is a massive change, but we didn’t see it. There are other things where I'm quite certain, we're going to see some changes, that we can already sort of tell we've seen some changes. So, loneliness is going up for particular populations. I was telling somebody, I would say if you were to make a gross generalization, it's made single people living alone, lonelier. It's made a life for married couples with children harder and life for married couples without children, maybe more comfortable, assuming that everyone has their job in these conditions. You know, you're not seeing a lot of bored people trying to make sourdough among people with children.
Everybody has problems in different ways, but I think the reason I'm pointing that out is that if you think about the composition of the household, you have to think about the experience of loneliness, stress in very different ways. We know to look for a kind of greater loneliness overall, but particularly in certain populations, a lot of strife among people with children, especially school-aged children with schools closed. People with both parents working and a child in school, and parents have to work from home. That gives rise to the gender difference I saw already. We also know that many people have withdrawn many relations, particularly the relations that were maintained by the spaces they interacted in. It's funny, we often think about friendships or things that are formed or not form like make more friends, etc. but friendships also have to be maintained. Literally from the minute they're formed and a lot of the spaces where we interact with others work and, you know, the restaurant and the bar and the construction site and all of those places, those are essentially institutions that were maintaining our friendships for us. We didn't have to do a lot of labor to maintain that relation, even in a superficial way—but now we do.
For a lot of people, I think it lets our reconfiguration of their friendship structure towards those they feel more comfortable and more interested in maintaining, doing the effort that before you didn't have to do and away from the effortless ones.
Erin: I hear people positing that we may have fewer contacts after COVID, but they will be deeper. Is that true?
Dr. Small: I have not seen good tracking data on this. I would be extremely surprised if something like that didn't show up. On the other hand, I also would not be surprised if after things open up fully, people go back to normal. I just clarify what I mean by normal; I think a lot of people will have been changed in a long-term way. In study after study that looks at the network turnover, you tend to see the following: when people change work, they move to a different city, have kids, all of the kinds of events that ended up altering, you change your routines, you're going to change your networks, right? I've done one of these studies myself, when you look at the changes in your network, your friendship network, as a result of changes, in some aspect of your daily routine, COVID is one huge, massive tangent in everybody's daily routine. You're going to see another massive change after we go back to normal.
You often see the following: the composition of the network changes very quickly. Literally, even if I ask you, if you moved to a new city tomorrow, today I asked you, who your closest friends? You are going to give me some names. If I ask you in a month, you're going to get me a lot of different names. You're going to see quite a bit of turnover, but what's interesting is that the numbers don't change. It's not quite Dunbar's number, but we kind of have our own somewhat variable capacity, limited capacity to maintain close relations with others.
Erin: We talked a little bit about the built environment. In a lot of cities that you talk about, there's this undercurrent of how the city was originally designed to reflect the culture of the people in a way of living that was more close knit than the way we live today. Although you rarely mention the built environment explicitly, I was just wondering if you've had any experiences have stood out to you for places that you feel the environment has impacted the connections of communities.
Dr. Small: I can think of several contexts actually, where that has happened. So, one is in a housing complex I studied in Boston in Villa Victoria. This is a housing complex built right in the middle of the South end in Boston. For those of listeners who are not from Boston, the South end is not South Boston. Boston is confusing in that it has two different names, very different neighborhoods with the word South in it. The South end is a neighborhood in the middle of Boston, very near a lot of the commercial retail activities in the city but it's a very large residential neighborhood with beautiful brownstones built in the late 19th century, townhouses and rowhouses of various sorts. It was built to support community locally. It's streets are one way streets that are U-shaped. It has a little park and a little plaza with benches and so on, for community to gather. Physically, the buildings are also small, kind of townhouses, but they look different from those in the surrounding neighborhood.
I am certain that this contributes to the fact that many of the residents in the neighborhood in many respects, not all respects, but historically have been at a very isolated community from the surrounding South, in both directions. Many have tried to change that, especially over the last several years, but that's a clear case of, you know, you create a space to build community locally. If it's successful, you might actually also create a space that undermines community.
Erin: Oh, interesting. I mean, like you said, there's only so many connections and that tightness of the ingroup naturally affects the openness to larger group.
Dr. Small: I mean, if you imagine a map, a circular city and put it right in the middle of it, like a Target, a small neighborhood, we're going to call it Erinville, physically in the middle of the city that you have some options. You can make the streets in Erinville go East to West and North to South, so that everybody can pass through Erinville when they're going from one end of the city to the other. So, it's going to be a high traffic area, where people are passing through and easy to connect to people in it and out of it. But you know, hard for the people in it to maintain a sense that they're special or part of the community. You can also go back to the Target and you put that neighborhood in the middle, make streets coming from East, West, South and North end in Erinville. That means anybody driving those streets, it has to be somebody who lives there or is visiting somebody there.
So, you restrict access and you're more likely to sort of build the interactions in Erinville that are going to be more likely to be those of people who live in it. You restrict access to the outsiders, this isn't completely inevitable, mechanisms that end up contributing to what I think, ended up contributing to the other.
Erin: As it relates to your fascinating research on childcare centers, I wanted to share a tiny anecdote. One of my dearest friends now, we met during a natural disaster where I had no power in my house and I had to go hang out in the lobby of the childcare center to like charge a few things. We started talking and now our kids play together, and we support one another. So, for anyone that's not familiar with that research, can you say more about what you found?
Dr. Small: So basically, what I just described at the city, at neighborhood level, I've also seen at the organization level. We need to create an organization with spaces that contribute to community within the organization itself, and you just gave a great example. I wrote a book where I studied the networks of mothers who had children enrolled in childcare centers. At the time I wrote this book, I did not have children, and I was surprised about a lot of this. One of the things we found was also that whether parents, particularly mothers, it was mostly mothers who we study, because childcare centers are very gendered. Teachers, staff, cooks, directors, and most of the parents would pick up and drop off are women. Even though there was an overall pattern, there was also a lot of heterogeneity.
Erin: I know that you have so much research that talks about, you know, how these things look a little bit different with people that are of lower socioeconomic status, experiencing poverty, and why that's so important, their geography and all of those impacts. Maybe you could say a few words about that.
Dr. Small: First, it's going back to the theme of COVID. I think one of the many ways COVID has affected different people differently is the local institutions, barbershops, childcare centers, churches-- all of these were places where low-income populations in very high numbers form and maintain their social ties, their support ties or information ties. The closing of these places essentially removed a lot of the institutions that made passive maintenance of your connections possible. I think you're going to see consequences of that. I think that's one of the things I think is just hardest. I guess I'll qualify that by saying it's not a qualification, but it's more of a clarification.
So, you know, in the study we talked about earlier, when we looked at mothers with children in childcare centers, we looked at low income, moderate income, high income, couple of quite wealthy parents is national data and also data in New York city. We looked at white mothers, African American mothers, Asian, Asian American mothers, and Latino mothers across the board. I should say we saw the impacts both of the enrolling, the children in organizational space on the expansion of your network, but also of the network on your eventual wellbeing. So, the mental health of mothers who had kids in centers was actually higher than those with comparable kids who are not in centers, even after we took into account prior mental health, before the kids were starting center age, a very powerful mechanism was the formation of networks there.
The networks themselves mattered, and it affects everyone. I think part of what's important is that not everybody has similar resources to make up for the absence of those opportunities, and I think that has been one of the big consequences of COVID.
Erin: Yeah, I completely agree. I remember hearing the data point that you just shared, and I was just totally floored, it makes so much sense. When you talk about and think about designing for social connection, if you wish that there was one thing that designers would consider, what would that be?
Dr. Small: I would say the following, I think designers should consider multiple aspects of the community building for network formation process rather than just one. So, at a minimal level, creating an opportunity for people to interact is better than not creating the opportunity for people to interact. So, the lobby, as opposed to no lobby, it makes a difference. One can also design a space to increase the probability that the opportunity is capitalized on and there is evidence for this as well. There's really nice, interesting work on the role of two different things; one is composition and the other one is configuration. In composition, I will just point to the role of focal points. There've been all of these fabulous studies showing, for example, take a plaza and you put a sculpture, literally something to look at and it affects the probability that people connect more than not. There's quite a bit of research on network and the role of focus of activity, but seriously simple thinking about focal points, if you want to use that language, I think will make a difference.
You probably know of all the work, for example, showing that in an office building, it's not only the case that people whose offices are closer to the elevators, know other people at higher rates. We've seen this in multiple different kinds of studies, at the neighborhood level and also at the end, at the local level, but also that people whose paths overlap. So, designers can play a big role, not just in the presence of networks, but also in their use, by thinking a little bit beyond the maker space to kind of configure and compose a space.
Erin: I love that so much. So, is there anything else that you wish I'd asked or wanted to share?
Dr. Small: I think about, maybe I'd love to hear your podcast in six months to see how is COVID changing all of this. I tend to imagine, and there’s evidence already that we're going to return back to normal in terms of regular practices pretty quickly. I think the mayor of New York already announced the 80,000 city workers have to be return to the office, by the end of May. We know that that people many will push for that, but yet it's hard for me to imagine that some fundamental aspect of our relationship hasn't been changed. You know, a year of reflecting on this of going through some hardship is not easily forgotten. This is not something that we have data obviously to think about, but I would just be very curious to see what this conversation was like in six months.
Where to Find Dr. Mario Luis Small
Twitter: @MarioLuisSmall https://twitter.com/MarioLuisSmall
Website: http://www.marioluissmall.com/
Resources Mentioned
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick
About the Host
Erin is an architect and design researcher bridging the gap between research and practice with a focus on design for health. She believes in the power of places to heal, connect, and serve vulnerable people — from hospital patients and staff, to people struggling with social isolation and mental health challenges. Erin is driven by a commitment to help others and the joy of working together to solve complex problems with shared purpose.
Twitter: @erin_peavey
LinkedIn: Erin K. Peavey
Instagram: @design.for.health