Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T07:05:12.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Egonets as systematically biased windows on society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2020

Scott L. Feld Open the ORCID record for Scott L. Feld [Opens in a new window]  and
Alec McGail
Scott L. Feld*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Alec McGail
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA (e-mail: [email protected])
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A person’s egonet, the set of others with whom that person is connected, is a personal sample of society which especially influences that person’s experience and perceptions of society. We show that egonets systematically misrepresent the general population because each person is included in as many egonets as that person has “friends.” Previous research has recognized that this unequal weighting in egonets leads many people to find that their friends have more friends than they themselves have. This paper builds upon that research to show that people’s egonets provide them with systematically biased samples of the population more generally. We discuss how this ubiquitous egonet bias may have far reaching implications for people’s experiences and perceptions of frequencies of other people’s ties and traits in ways that may influence their own feelings and behaviors. In particular, these egonet biases may help explain people’s tendencies to disproportionately experience and overestimate the prevalence of certain types of deviance and other social behaviors and consequently be influenced toward them. We illustrate egonet bias with analyses of all friends among 63,731 Facebook users. We call for further empirical investigation of egonet biases and their consequences for individuals and society.

Keywords

egonetsbiased samplesfriendship paradoxhomophilysocial psychologyrisky behaviorsinterpersonal comparisonsweighted samplesfalse impressionssocial network theory
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 8 , Issue 3: Special Issue Ego Networks , September 2020 , pp. 399 - 417
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Special Issue Editors: Brea L. Perry, Bernice A. Pescosolido, Mario L. Small, and Ann McCranie

References

Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. A. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130–1132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berkowitz, A. D. (2005). An overview of the social norms approach. In Lederman, L. C. & Stewart, L. P. (Eds.), Changing the culture of college drinking (pp. 193–214). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Chassin, L., Presson, C. C., Sherman, S. J., & Edwards, D. A. (1991). Four pathways to young–adult smoking status: Adolescent social–psychological antecedents in a midwestern community sample. Health Psychology, 10, 409–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleman, J. S. (1961). The adolescent society: The social life of the teenager and its impact on education. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.Google Scholar
Eom, Y.-H., & Jo, H.-H. (2015). Generalized friendship paradox in complex networks: The case of scientific collaboration. Scientific Reports, 4(1), 4603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feiler, D. C., & Kleinbaum, A. M. (2015). Popularity, similarity, and the network extraversion bias. Psychological Science, 26(5), 593–603.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feld, S. L. (1984). The structured use of personal associates. Social Forces, 62(3), 640–652.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feld, S. L. (1991). Why your friends have more friends than you do. American Journal of Sociology, 96(6), 1464–1477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social pressures in informal groups; a study of human factors in housing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Grund, T. U. (2014). Why your friends are more important and special than you think. Sociological Science, 1(April), 128–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitts, J. A. (2003). Egocentric bias or information management? Selective disclosure and the social roots of norm misperception. Social Psychology Quarterly, 66(3), 222–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kooti, F., Hodas, N. O., & Lerman, K. (2014). Network weirdness: Exploring the origins of network paradoxes. Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 266–274.Google Scholar
Kumar, V., Krackhardt, D., & Feld, S. (2018). Network interventions based on inversity: Leveraging the friendship paradox in unknown network structures. Working Paper, Yale University.Google Scholar
Lerman, K., Yan, X., & Wu, X. Z. (2016). The “majority illusion” in social networks. PLoS ONE, 11(2), 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, M. A., Lee, C. M., Patrick, M. E., & Fossos, N. (2007). Gender-specific normative misperceptions of risky sexual behavior and alcohol-related risky sexual behavior. Sex Roles, 57(1), 81–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martens, M. P., Page, J. C., Mowry, E. S., Damann, K. M., Taylor, K. K., & Cimini, M. D. (2006). Differences between actual and perceived student norms: An examination of alcohol use, drug use, and sexual behavior. Journal of American College Health, 54(5), 295–300.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maxwell, K. A. (2002). Friends: The role of peer influence across adolescent risk behaviors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 31(4), 267–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mcpherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415–444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, M. E. J. (2002). Assortative mixing in networks. Physical Review Letters, 89(20), 208701.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nisbett, R. E., & Kunda, Z. (1985). Perception of social distributions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(2), 297–311.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Osgood, D. W., Daniel, T. R., Lacey, W., Scott, D. G., Mark, E. F., & James, M. (2013). Peers and the emergence of alcohol use: Influence and selection processes in adolescent friendship networks. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 23(3), 500–512.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Otten, R., Engels, R. C. M. E., & Prinstein, M. J. (2009). A prospective study of perception in adolescent smoking. Journal of Adolescent Health, 44(5), 478–484.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perkins, H. W., Meilman, P. W., Leichliter, J. S., Cashin, J. R., & Presley, C. A. (1999). Misperceptions of the norms for the frequency of alcohol and other drug use on college campuses. Journal of American College Health, 47(6), 253–258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perkins, H. W. (2002). Social norms and the prevention of alcohol misuse in collegiate contexts. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Supplement, (14), 164–172.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perkins, H. W. (Ed.). (2003). The social norms approach to preventing school and college age substance abuse: A handbook for educators, counselors, and clinicians. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Perkins, H. W., Haines, M. P., & Rice, R. (2005). Misperceiving the college drinking norm and related problems: A nationwide study of exposure to prevention information, perceived norms and student alcohol misuse. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 66(4), 470–478.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prinstein, M. J., Meade, C. S., & Cohen, C. L. (2003). Adolescent oral sex, peer popularity, and perceptions of best friends’ sexual behavior. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 28(4), 243–249. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpepsy/jsg012CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ross, S. M. (2010). A first course in probability. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education International.Google Scholar
Rözer, J., Mollenhorst, G., & Poortman, A.-R. (2016). Family and friends: Which types of personal relationships go together in a network? Social Indicators Research, 127(2), 809–826.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scholly, K., Katz, A. R., Gascoigne, J., & Holck, P. S. (2005). Using social norms theory to explain perceptions and sexual health behaviors of undergraduate college students: An exploratory study. Journal of American College Health, 53(4), 159–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, J. A. (2015). Global network inference from ego network samples: Testing a simulation approach. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 39(2), 125–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staiano, J., Pianesi, F., Lepri, B., Sebe, N., Aharony, N., & Pentland, A. (2012). Friends don’t lie: Inferring personality traits from social network structure. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 321–330). Pittsburg: ACM.Google Scholar
Sussman, S., Dent, C. W., Mestel-Rauch, J., & Johnson, C. A. (1988). Adolescent nonsmokers, triers, and regular smokers’ estimates of cigarette smoking prevalence: When do overestimations occur and by whom? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18: 537–551.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tong, S. T., Van Der Heide, B., Langwell, L., & Walther, J. B. (2008). Too much of a good thing? The relationship between number of friends and interpersonal impressions on Facebook. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(3), 531–549.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ugander, J., Karrer, B., Backstrom, L., & Marlow, C. (2011). The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph. Arxiv preprint arxiv:1111.4503.Google Scholar
Viswanath, B., Mislove, A., Cha, M., & Gummadi, K. P. (2009). On the evolution of user interaction in Facebook. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks (pp. 37–42). New York, NY: ACM.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, E. W., & Jost, J. T. (2001). What makes you think you’re so popular? Self-evaluation maintenance and the subjective side of the “Friendship Paradox”. Social Psychology Quarterly, 64(3), 207–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar