The Social-Network Illusion That Tricks Your Mind: The Majority Illusion
This article discusses many interesting concepts covered in class so far. It mentions the friendship paradox which states that “on average your friends will have more friends than you do” explained by how “the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law.” This concept holds in other contexts, including one’s coauthors’ number of citations and one’s Twitter friends’ number of posts. All of these can be explained by the power law distribution of popularity, meaning most nodes have a small number of in-links and a few nodes have a huge number of in-links, skewing the average.
The majority illusion is “the local impression that a specific attribute is common when the global truth is entirely different.” It occurs because individuals can observe this attribute in the majority of their friends even though that attribute is rare overall. This ties back to popularity. If the few most popular people have a given attribute, almost everyone in the network will see that because of how popular these people are. This can lead others to believe that this attribute is much more common that it actually is. This can happen in many different contexts, but “the effect is largest in the political blogs network, where as many as 60%-70% of nodes will have a majority active neighbours, even when only 20% of the nodes are active.” This can have a large impact, allowing extreme views held by influential people to spread through the network quickly, not because they are superior ideas but because of the majority illusion and the tendency of people to follow crowds.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/538866/the-social-network-illusion-that-tricks-your-mind/