Exploring Majority Illusion and Pluralistic Ignorance within the Context of Eastern European Social Media
Abstract
The proposed research aims to extend understanding of the majority illusion and pluralistic ignorance within the context of informat"ion diffusion moderated by social media in Eastern Europe. The majority illusion (Lerman, Yan, and Wu 2016) is a situation in which" most people in a network believe that the majority of the network holds a belief that in reality is only held by a minority the act"ors. This concept is illustrated in Figure 1. In both networks, three of 14 nodes hold a belief, indicated by the node~s red color."" Nodes in the network are not connected to everyone. The neighborhood of nodes they are connected to range from one to nine, dependi"ng on their position. Table 1 indicates the percentage of actors in a node~s neighborhood that hold the minority belief. An actor~s opinion of the group~s overall beliefs are based on their understanding of the beliefs in their neighborhood. For the network on th"e left, all but three actors see that a majority of their neighborhood holds the belief. For the network on the right, nodes see tha"t a minority of their neighborhood holds the belief. The network on the left is therefore experiencing a majority illusion.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 20, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812128
Entities
People
- John Skvoretz
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of South Florida