Weak ties can be more powerful than strong ties, especially in how gossip spreads or political movements start. Their power can help explain how a protest can expand from a group of friends into a broad social movement.
The sense of obligation that neighborhoods and communities place upon themselves is one way in which weak ties are expressed. Peer pressure (and other social habits that encourage people to conform to group expectations) often spread through weak ties and gain authority through communal expectations. “If you ignore the social obligations of your neighborhood, if you shrug off the expected patterns of your community, you risk losing your social standing” and you “endanger your access to many of the social benefits that come from” being part of a club or community.
In the case of landing a job, these relationships are also more important than strong ties. They “give access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong.”
The power of weak ties comes from their role as Network Shortcuts that connect otherwise distant clusters. In highly clustered social networks where most people know their neighbors, just a few connections to people outside your immediate circle can reduce the degrees of separation from millions of steps to just six. This structural property explains why weak ties are so effective for spreading movements, finding jobs, and accessing novel information—they provide bridges to entirely different parts of the network that your close friends cannot reach.