Related papers: The Majority Illusion in Social Networks
Majority Illusion is a phenomenon in social networks wherein the decision by the majority of the network is not the same as one's personal social circle's majority, leading to an incorrect perception of the majority in a large network. In…
Common knowledge of intentions is crucial to basic social tasks ranging from cooperative hunting to oligopoly collusion, riots, revolutions, and the evolution of social norms and human culture. Yet little is known about how common knowledge…
Feld's friendship paradox states that "your friends have more friends than you, on average." This paradox arises because extremely popular people, despite being rare, are overrepresented when averaging over friends. Using a sample of the…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
We study a family of binary state, socially-inspired contagion models which incorporate imitation limited by an aversion to complete conformity. We uncover rich behavior in our models whether operating with either probabilistic or…
Humans do not always make rational choices, a fact that experimental economics is putting on solid grounds. The social context plays an important role in determining our actions, and often we imitate friends or acquaintances without any…
Human social behavior is organized in stratified, hierarchical networks, with a support group with about 5 members, expanding proportionally at each layer up to a maximum of approximately 150 frequent interactions per individual. This is…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
Consider n individuals who, by popular vote, choose among q >= 2 alternatives, one of which is "better" than the others. Assume that each individual votes independently at random, and that the probability of voting for the better…
Threshold models of global cascades have been extensively used to model real-world collective behavior, such as the contagious spread of fads and the adoption of new technologies. A common property of those cascade models is that a…
Complex contagions describe systems where the probability or rate of contagious transmission is a nonlinear function of the exposure to contagious agents. These models were first studied theoretically but have since been used to capture…
The classical friendship paradox asserts that, on average, an individual's neighbors have a higher degree than the individual. This statement concerns network-level means and does not describe how often a typical node is locally dominated…
The collective behaviour of people adopting an innovation, product or online service is commonly interpreted as a spreading phenomenon throughout the fabric of society. This process is arguably driven by social influence, social learning…
We study binary state dynamics on a network where each node acts in response to the average state of its neighborhood. Allowing varying amounts of stochasticity in both the network and node responses, we find different outcomes in random…
Cognitive biases are often attributed to heuristics or limited information. Yet the structure of social networks is a key, often-overlooked source of perceptual bias. When information passes through social connections, the network alone can…
Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
Most people consider their friends to be more positive than themselves, exhibiting a Sentiment Paradox. Psychology research attributes this paradox to human cognition bias. With the goal to understand this phenomenon, we study sentiment…
Most individuals in social networks experience a so-called Friendship Paradox: they are less popular than their friends on average. This effect may explain recent findings that widespread social network media use leads to reduced happiness.…
Complex contagion models have been developed to understand a wide range of social phenomena such as adoption of cultural fads, the diffusion of belief, norms, and innovations in social networks, and the rise of collective action to join a…