Why People You Barely Know Could Change Your Life

Your acquaintances, colleagues, and casual friends aren't just background noise. Here's how weak ties influence your opportunities, ideas, and personal development.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | November 5, 2025

When you think about relationships, connections or people who are important to you, the first ones to come to mind are probably your closest ones: your best friends, family, partner or maybe even mentors.

These bonds might be synonymous with love and support for you. It is widely known that the closest people to you can, in many ways, influence your habits and help you through some of life's tough moments. But what's less commonly known or acknowledged is the power of the people you aren't particularly close to.

Think of the old college friend you run into every couple of years, the former colleague who sent you a job link, the barista you chat with every morning or someone you met once at a mutual friend's party. These kinds of relationships are what are known as "weak ties."

These are, in essence, connections that exist outside your core circle. You might not speak to them often, but they form the outer layer of your social world. A renowned classic research study titled "The Strength of Weak Ties," conducted by sociologist Mark Granovetter, showed that people often found job leads and life opportunities not through their close friends, but through acquaintances.

This happens because weak ties move in different circles. They introduce you to new perspectives and chances you wouldn't stumble upon within your usual bubble. In fact, this outer circle that may be adding to your individual growth more than you realize.

Here are three ways your weak ties help you grow in life.

1. Weak Ties Open You Up To New Opportunities

In the 1973 study, Granovetter surveyed 280 professionals and found that nearly 84% of people had landed jobs via someone they weren't particularly close to. Often, it was someone they'd seen only occasionally or hadn't spoken to in months that ultimately helped them out.

Your strong ties usually happen to participate in the same social and informational circles that you do. While they're reliable as a source of emotional support, they may unintentionally keep you in a loop of familiar ideas and networks.

In contrast, weak ties can often serve as bridges to entirely new social ecosystems. These looser connections are more likely to work in different industries and come from different backgrounds.

This was put to test again in a 2022 experimental study by LinkedIn, MIT and Stanford, published in Science. Researchers analyzed how people found new job opportunities through different types of social connections.

Using LinkedIn's "People you may know" algorithm, which recommends new contacts to users, they randomly varied how often weak or strong ties were shown to different users. Then, researchers tracked what kind of ties led to actual job changes.

It was found that moderately weak ties, like distant acquaintances, were actually more effective for job opportunities than strong ties, like close friends or family.

However, not all weak ties were equally helpful. Ties that were weak but not too weak led to the highest job mobility. These ties were measured on the basis of how many mutual connections there were or how often the participants interacted with them.

This shows that expanding your network beyond your inner circle can open unexpected doors. The right kind of weak ties — those distant yet relevant connections — can serve as the most powerful catalysts for new opportunities.

2. Weak Ties Broaden Your Perspective

The people closest are, most likely, your safe space. They feel familiar, more aligned to you and comforting. But sometimes, this similarity can unintentionally keep your worldview from growing.

It can be hard to recognize when your inner circle turns into an echo chamber, in which you're rarely challenged to question your assumptions, stretch your thinking or consider new perspectives. They can stunt your personal, intellectual and even professional growth.

In contrast, weak ties can often provide you with unique and novel information simply because they exist within different social, cultural or professional circles. They have access to ideas, experiences and resources that lie outside your usual circle.

A casual conversation with an acquaintance, for instance, might introduce you to a new perspective, nudge you to consider a job opportunity or even expose you to a way of thinking you had never considered. This way, weak ties expose you to the unfamiliar, and that unfamiliarity is often where growth begins.

In a massive 2012 field experiment conducted on Facebook, presented at the 21st International World Wide Web Conference, researchers set out to test the role of social networks in information diffusion. They particularly examined whether people are more likely to share something if they saw that a friend has already shared it. Studying 253 million Facebook users, they tested the influence of both strong and weak ties.

The results showed that close friends (strong ties) had more individual influence. Weak ties, on the other hand, given their sheer volume and access to different networks, were responsible for spreading the most novel information.

This makes weak ties essential not just for opportunity, but also for intellectual growth and creative thinking.

3. Week Ties Enhance Your Sense of Belonging

Close friends and family offer deep emotional support and thus form the backbone of your inner circle. However, because of their depth, these relationships can sometimes carry unspoken expectations and emotional responsibilities.

On the other hand, something like a quick check-in with a neighbor or small talk with a classmate may feel lighter and surprisingly refreshing. This can simply be due to the fact that it doesn't carry the same emotional weight.

Research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that university students reported feeling happier and more connected on days when they interacted with more of their classmates than usual. This was true even if those interactions were brief or surface-level. In other studies, participants who had more conversations with peripheral members of their social network reported greater feelings of belonging and well-being overall.

The bottom line is that you cannot underestimate the power of even the smallest of moments of friendliness with your acquaintances. These everyday exchanges create a network of subtle but strong connections, which often bear fruit in the unlikeliest of ways.

How connected have you been feeling lately to those around you? Take this science-backed test to find out: Social Connectedness Scale

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.