arXiv:1506.03022v1[cs.SI]9Jun2015 The Majority Illusion in Social Networks Kristina Lerman, Xiaoran Yan, and Xin-Zeng Wu USC Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292 (Dated: June 10, 2015) Social behaviors are often...
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arXiv:1506.03022v1[cs.SI]9Jun2015 The Majority Illusion in Social Networks Kristina Lerman, Xiaoran Yan, and Xin-Zeng Wu USC Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292 (Dated: June 10, 2015) Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political movements, arise as a result of people following a simple local rule, such as copy what others are doing. However, individuals often lack global knowledge of the behaviors of others and must estimate them from the observations of their friends’ behaviors. In some cases, the structure of the underlying social network can dramatically skew an individual’s local observations, making a behavior appear far more common locally than it is globally. We trace the origins of this phenomenon, which we call “the majority illusion,” to the friendshi
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