AILo Talk - Maaike Los, University of Groningen

Title: On The Graph Theory of Majority Illusions

Abstract:

Social networks can distort the information that agents have about global properties of the population. For instance, if you are confronted with a majority of opposing opinions in your circles, you might get the impression that you belong to a minority, although this is not necessarily the case. Not all networks allow for such 'illusions', the way a social network is wired determines what kind of information distortion can actually occur. Some classes of graphs allow for a majority of agents to have the wrong impression about what the majority opinion is, that is, to be in a ‘majority illusion’.

In this AILo talk I will discuss these phenomena and the methods we use to study them, show some of the results we found, and argue why you shouldn't always follow the majority of your friends.