In this last blog entry, we would like to respond to some commentators and discuss our new research on the consequences of social networks. Dasarge and Fischer both discuss leadership. We can find some evidence of the importance of leadership. Black soldiers with an abolitionist officer were less likely to desert. But this was less important to their desertion decision than being in a company with guys like them. So to in response to Richard Aubrey, if you wanted to keep your men from deserting during the Civil War (and keeping men from deserting is a good idea if you want to win a war) having a homogeneous unit was the most important factor we could identify. We also find that men who had more of their (non-commissioned) officers in Andersonville were more likely to survive. Officers divided up the rations. We’d like to do more to identify the effects of leadership but our problem is identifying a good leader versus a bad one.
Our new research builds on the insights presented in our recent Heroes and Cowards book. We are convinced that empirical work on social networks offers social scientists with an interdisciplinary inclination to work together. Recently, sociologists, economists, political scientists and legal scholars have all made important contributions to this field.
Research on terrorist organizations indicates that friends and relatives join together and work together. By one estimate, roughly three quarters of mujahedin joined the global Salafi Jihad (of which Al Qaeda is a part) either as a group with friends or relatives or as men with close social ties to members (Sageman 2004: 114). Seventy percent of captured Italian Red Brigade terrorists had joined a friend who was in the terrorist organization