A View from Emerging Technology from the arXiv

The Social-Network Illusion That Tricks Your

Mind
Network scientists have discovered how social networks can create the illusion
that something is common when it is actually rare.

June 30, 2015

ne of the curious things about social networks is the way that

O some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire
while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely
register at all. The content itself cannot be the source of this difference.
Instead, there must be some property of the network that changes to
allow some ideas to spread but not others.
Today, we get an insight into why this happens thanks to the work of
Kristina Lerman and pals at the University of Southern California.
These people have discovered an extraordinary illusion associated with
social networks which can play tricks on the mind and explain
everything from why some ideas become popular quickly to how risky
or antisocial behavior can spread so easily.

Network scientists have known about the paradoxical nature of social

networks for some time. The most famous example is the friendship
paradox: on average your friends will have more friends than you do.

This comes about because the distribution of friends on social networks

follows a power law. So while most people will have a small number of
friends, a few individuals have huge numbers of friends. And these
people skew the average.

Heres an analogy. If you measure the height of all your male friends.
youll find that the average is about 170 centimeters. If you are male, on
average, your friends will be about the same height as you are. Indeed,
the mathematical notion of average is a good way to capture the
nature of this data.

But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than yousay,
one kilometer or 10 kilometers tall. This person would dramatically
skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on
average. In this case, the average is a poor way to capture this data set.

Exactly this situation occurs in social networks, and not just for
numbers of friends. On average, your coauthors will be cited more often
than you, and the people you follow on Twitter will post more
frequently than you, and so on.

Now Lerman and co have discovered a related paradox, which they call
the majority illusion. This is the phenomenon in which an individual
can observe a behavior or attribute in most of his or her friends, even
though it is rare in the network as a whole.

They illustrate this illusion with a theoretical example: a set of 14 nodes

linked up to form a small world network, just like a real social network
(see picture above). They then color three of these nodes and count how
many of the remaining nodes link to them in a single step.

Two versions of this setup are shown above. In the left-hand example,
the uncolored nodes see more than half of their neighbors as colored. In
the right-hand example, this is not true for any of the uncolored nodes.

But heres the thing: the structure of the network is the same in both
cases. The only thing that changes is the nodes that are colored.
This is the majority illusionthe local impression that a specific
attribute is common when the global truth is entirely different.

The reason isnt hard to see. The majority illusion occurs when the
most popular nodes are colored. Because these link to the greatest
number of other nodes, they skew the view from the ground, as it were.
Thats why this illusion is so closely linked to the friendship paradox.

Lerman and co go on to tweak the parameters of the network, by

changing the distribution of links and so on, to see how the majority
illusion depends on them. It turns out that the conditions under which
the illusion can occur are surprisingly broad.

So how prevalent is it in the real world? To find out, Lerman and co

study several real-world networks including the coauthorship network
of high-energy physicists, the follower graph of the social-media
network Digg, and the network representing links between political
blogs.

And the majority illusion can occur in all of them. 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, they say. In other words, the majority illusion can be
used to trick the population into believing something that is not true.

Thats interesting work that immediately explains a number of

interesting phenomena. For a start, it shows how some content can
spread globally while other similar content does notthe key is to start
with a small number of well-connected early adopters fooling the rest
of the network into thinking it is common.
That might seem harmless when it comes to memes on Reddit or videos
on YouTube. But it can have more insidious effects too. Under some
conditions, even a minority opinion can appear to be extremely popular
locally, say Lerman and co. That might explain how extreme views can
sometimes spread so easily.

It might also explain the spread of antisocial behavior. Various studies

have shown that teenagers consistently overestimate the amount of
alcohol and drugs their friends consume. If heavy drinkers also happen
to be more popular, then people examining their friends drinking
behavior will conclude that, on average, their friends drink more than
they do, say Lermann and co.

In other words, blame the majority illusion.

Thats important, but it is not yet a marketers charter. For that,

marketers must first be able to identify the popular nodes that can
create the majority illusion for the target audience. These influencerati
must then be persuaded to adopt the desired behavior or product.

Thats a goal that any good marketer will already have identified. At
least now they know how and why it can work.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1506.03022 : The Majority Illusion in Social

Networks

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