The "Majority Illusion" in Social Networks.
The "Majority Illusion" in Social Networks.
复制标题
DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0147617
复制
发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Wu XZ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lerman K;Yan X;Wu XZ
个人的决定，从购买什么产品到是否从事冒险行为，往往取决于其他人的选择、行为或状态。然而，人们很少对他人的状态有全局的了解，而必须通过对社会交往的局部观察来估计他们。网络结构会显著地扭曲个体的局部观察。在某些情况下，在网络中全球罕见的状态可能在许多个体的本地社区中显着过度代表。这种效应，我们称之为“多数错觉”，导致个人系统地高估了这种状态的普遍程度，这可能会加速社会传染病的传播。我们开发了一个统计模型来量化这种效应，并通过合成和现实世界网络的测量来验证它。我们表明，这种错觉在具有异质程度分布和非分类结构的网络中加剧。
Individual’s decisions, from what product to buy to whether to engage in risky behavior, often depend on the choices, behaviors, or states of other people. People, however, rarely have global knowledge of the states of others, but must estimate them from the local observations of their social contacts. Network structure can significantly distort individual’s local observations. Under some conditions, a state that is globally rare in a network may be dramatically over-represented in the local neighborhoods of many individuals. This effect, which we call the “majority illusion,” leads individuals to systematically overestimate the prevalence of that state, which may accelerate the spread of social contagions. We develop a statistical model that quantifies this effect and validate it with measurements in synthetic and real-world networks. We show that the illusion is exacerbated in networks with a heterogeneous degree distribution and disassortative structure.