31,817 research outputs found
Which friends are more popular than you? Contact strength and the friendship paradox in social networks
The friendship paradox states that in a social network, egos tend to have lower degree than their alters, or, “your friends have more friends than you do”. Most research has focused on the friendship paradox and its implications for information transmission, but treating the network as static and unweighted. Yet, people can dedicate only a finite fraction of their attention budget to each social interaction: a high-degree individual may have less time to dedicate to individual social links, forcing them to modulate the quantities of contact made to their different social ties. Here we study the friendship paradox in the context of differing contact volumes between egos and alters, finding a connection between contact volume and the strength of the friendship paradox. The most frequently contacted alters exhibit a less pronounced friendship paradox compared with the ego, whereas less-frequently contacted alters are more likely to be high degree and give rise to the paradox. We argue therefore for a more nuanced version of the friendship paradox: “your closest friends have slightly more friends than you do”, and in certain networks even: “your best friend has no more friends than you do”. We demonstrate that this relationship is robust, holding in both a social media and a mobile phone dataset. These results have implications for information transfer and influence in social networks, which we explore using a simple dynamical model.James P. Bagrow, Christopher M. Danforth and Lewis Mitchel
The happiness paradox: your friends are happier than you
Most individuals in social networks experience a so-called Friendship
Paradox: they are less popular than their friends on average. This effect may
explain recent findings that widespread social network media use leads to
reduced happiness. However the relation between popularity and happiness is
poorly understood. A Friendship paradox does not necessarily imply a Happiness
paradox where most individuals are less happy than their friends. Here we
report the first direct observation of a significant Happiness Paradox in a
large-scale online social network of Twitter users. Our results reveal
that popular individuals are indeed happier and that a majority of individuals
experience a significant Happiness paradox. The magnitude of the latter effect
is shaped by complex interactions between individual popularity, happiness, and
the fact that users cluster assortatively by level of happiness. Our results
indicate that the topology of online social networks and the distribution of
happiness in some populations can cause widespread psycho-social effects that
affect the well-being of billions of individuals.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 2 table
A study on the friendship paradox – quantitative analysis and relationship with assortative mixing
The friendship paradox is the observation that friends of individuals tend to have more friends or be more popular than the individuals themselves. In this work, we first study local metrics to capture the strength of the paradox and the direction of the paradox from the perspective of individual nodes, i.e., an indication of whether the individual is more or less popular than its friends. These local metrics are aggregated, and global metrics are proposed to express the phenomenon on a network-wide level. Theoretical results show that the defined metrics are well-behaved enough to capture the friendship paradox. We also theoretically analyze the behavior of the friendship paradox for popular network models in order to understand regimes where friendship paradox occurs. These theoretical findings are complemented by experimental results on both network models and real-world networks. By conducting a correlation study between the proposed metrics and degree assortativity, we experimentally demonstrate that the phenomenon of the friendship paradox is related to the well-known phenomenon of assortative mixing
Sentiment Paradoxes in Social Networks: Why Your Friends Are More Positive Than You?
Most people consider their friends to be more positive than themselves,
exhibiting a Sentiment Paradox. Psychology research attributes this paradox to
human cognition bias. With the goal to understand this phenomenon, we study
sentiment paradoxes in social networks. Our work shows that social connections
(friends, followees, or followers) of users are indeed (not just illusively)
more positive than the users themselves. This is mostly due to positive users
having more friends. We identify five sentiment paradoxes at different network
levels ranging from triads to large-scale communities. Empirical and
theoretical evidence are provided to validate the existence of such sentiment
paradoxes. By investigating the relationships between the sentiment paradox and
other well-developed network paradoxes, i.e., friendship paradox and activity
paradox, we find that user sentiments are positively correlated to their number
of friends but rarely to their social activity. Finally, we demonstrate how
sentiment paradoxes can be used to predict user sentiments.Comment: The 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM
2020
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