Friendship paradox biases perceptions in directed networks

Nazanin Alipourfard; Buddhika Nettasinghe; Andrés Abeliuk; Vikram Krishnamurthy; Kristina Lerman

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-14394-x

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Friendship paradox biases perceptions in directed networks

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Friendship paradox biases perceptions in directed networks

Nazanin Alipourfard, Buddhika Nettasinghe, Andrés Abeliuk, Vikram Krishnamurthy and Kristina Lerman

Nature communications, Vol.11(1), pp.707-707

02/05/2020

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14394-x

PMCID: PMC7002371

PMID: 32024843

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Abstract

Social networks shape perceptions by exposing people to the actions and opinions of their peers. However, the perceived popularity of a trait or an opinion may be very different from its actual popularity. We attribute this perception bias to friendship paradox and identify conditions under which it appears. We validate the findings empirically using Twitter data. Within posts made by users in our sample, we identify topics that appear more often within users' social feeds than they do globally among all posts. We also present a polling algorithm that leverages the friendship paradox to obtain a statistically efficient estimate of a topic's global prevalence from biased individual perceptions. We characterize the polling estimate and validate it through synthetic polling experiments on Twitter data. Our paper elucidates the non-intuitive ways in which the structure of directed networks can distort perceptions and presents approaches to mitigate this bias.

Algorithms

Bias

Friends - psychology

Humans

Online Social Networking

Reproducibility of Results

Details

Title: Subtitle: Friendship paradox biases perceptions in directed networks
Creators: Nazanin Alipourfard - ITER
Buddhika Nettasinghe - Cornell University
Andrés Abeliuk - ITER
Vikram Krishnamurthy - Cornell University
Kristina Lerman - ITER
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Nature communications, Vol.11(1), pp.707-707
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14394-x
PMID: 32024843
PMCID: PMC7002371
NLM abbreviation: Nat Commun
ISSN: 2041-1723
eISSN: 2041-1723
Grant note: DOI: 10.13039/100000181, name: United States Department of Defense | United States Air Force | AFMC | Air Force Office of Scientific Research, award: FA9550-17-1-0327; DOI: 10.13039/100000183, name: United States Department of Defense | United States Army | U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command | Army Research Office, award: W911NF-16-1-0306
Language: English
Date published: 02/05/2020
Academic Unit: Business Analytics
Record Identifier: 9984422858002771

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