History 1
In the fall of 1932, there was an epidemic of runaways at the Hudson School for Girls in upstate New York. In a period of just two weeks, 14 girls had run away— a rate 30 times higher than the norm. Jacob Moreno, a psychiatrist, suggested the reason for the spate of runaways had less to do with individual factors pertaining to the girls’ personalities and motivations than with the positions of the runaways in an underlying social network (3). Moreno and his collaborator, Helen Jennings, had mapped the social network at Hudson using “sociometry,” a technique for eliciting and graphically representing individuals’ subjective feelings towards one another (Fig. 1). The links in this social network, Moreno argued, provided channels for the flow of social influence and ideas among the girls. In a way that even the girls themselves may not have been conscious of, it was their location in the social network that determined whether and when they ran away.