The Illusion of the Majority
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/majority-illusion/
This article focuses on what it calls the ‘majority illusion’, which is the idea that if a person sees that the majority of their friends are either for or against an issue, then they think that this group is representative of the general population. However, this does not mean that the majority of people hold the same beliefs as this group of friends. The example from the article is fairly straightforward. It asks a group of people in a network if they think baseball caps are stylish or not. While most were against baseball caps, most people had a majority of friends for baseball caps. Only 3 people were for baseball caps, but because these 3 people were the most highly connected in the network, to the other people in the network, it seemed as if the majority of people were indeed for baseball caps. A passage from the article sums the whole paradox up well, “But paradoxes like the majority illusion apply concretely to our world, from the way we fight drug epidemics to how quickly public opinion sometimes flip flops. Understanding the theory behind them gives essential insight into why people form the opinions and make the decisions that they do.” In the age where social media use is widespread and others are frequently expressing their opinions, this paradox might be affecting many people without them even realizing.
This illusion appears counterintuitive at first, but in reality it is quite simple. The study focuses on each node in the network and then looks at all of its friends (nodes connected to it by an edge). Out of the 14 people, 11 of them were against baseball caps, yet had friend groups that as a majority, were for baseball caps. In fact, the 3 groups that were against baseball caps as a majority were actually the friend groups of the only 3 people to be in support of the caps. Essentially, this whole paradox arises because the 3 people for baseball caps are the also most highly connected in the network. Because each node in this network does not have that many friends, and is friends with at least one of the 3 highly connected nodes, it appears to them that the majority of others are for baseball caps, even when this is not the case. This idea is quite interesting, and arises from a study on a network, similar to ones we have studied in this course. It was cool to see an example of how the principles in this class can be used in the real world in order to uncover a hidden paradox in how we perceive “the majority”.