What Your Friends Don’t Know About You
How well do you know your friends’ political views? According to recent work by Winter Mason, Duncan Watts, and myself, you probably don’t know them as well as you think. In particular, we found that when friends disagree on a political issue, they are unaware of that disagreement about 60% of the time. Even close friends who discuss politics are typically unaware of their differences in opinions.
Homophily, the tendency for individuals to associate with similar others, is one of the more consistently observed phenomena of the social world. While reports of homophily have focused on socio-demographic attributes—like age, gender, and race—it’s reasonable that homophily would extend to attitudes as well, in part because individuals likely seek out those who agree with them, and in part because social pressure often breeds conformity. However, measuring the extent to which friends agree with one another is a tough empirical problem, and quantifying the differences between actual and perceived homophily was, until recently, prohibitively difficult.
Enter Facebook, the social science experimentation platform with a subject pool of 400 million strong (and growing). To examine the differences between real and perceived attitude agreement, we built a Facebook game where players both answered a series of questions about their own attitudes, and attempted to guess how particular friends would respond. We collected 12,000+ responses in which we had a player’s answer to a given question, their friend’s answer to that same question, and the player’s guess as to what their friend would say.
The figure below shows that people consistently overestimate the likelihood that their friends agree with them on political issues. Notably, even though close friends (so-called strong ties[1]) are in reality more likely to agree with one another than distant friends, people do not appropriately adjust their perceptions. In other words, though we think close and distant friends are about equally likely to agree with us on political issues, in reality we are much more likely to agree with close friends.
Upon reflection, it’s perhaps not so surprising that we often don’t know where our friends stand on hot-button political issues. How many times have you actually asked your friends how they feel about abortion, capital punishment, or affirmative action? Inferring friends’ attitudes is further complicated by the fact that political positions tend to be only weakly correlated across issues. For example, according to the 2008 General Social Survey, 65% of people who support abortion rights also support capital punishment, compared to 68% among those who oppose abortions. That is, someone’s position on abortion tells you nearly nothing about their view on capital punishment.
I think society would benefit from friends and neighbors engaging in more active political deliberation, discussions that at the very least leave participants aware of each other’s views. On the other hand, if your friends really knew what you thought, you might have a lot fewer friends.
N.B. For more details, check out our paper.
Illustration by Kelly Savage
Footnotes
[1] We define the tie strength between a pair of individuals by considering the number of mutual friends that they have, and whether or not the pair discusses politics.
In olden days a person could keep track of who held what opinions. Discussions were more intimate and things that were said in the parlor weren’t tacked up on a public bulletin board for a lifetime.
There is a tendency towards complete transparency in this age of the internet and social networking. But I’m not sure that’s a good thing. There needs to be public places for discussion, yet more discreet places to share news, events and general conversation without revealing deep feelings and opinions.
How do people maintain a sense of individuality and privacy with the onslaught of web connectivity? I think it’s by allosing them to withhold controversial beliefs in public, polite forums. So I’m not sure society would benefit from having everything laid on the virtual table in all forums. I think there needs to be accommodations for private discussions that are not recorded, and ways to keep controversial issues at bay in some public discussions.
But for those who want the public arena of a good debate, there should be forums available. And perhaps there should be ways for forums of one ideology to engage those of the opposite ideology – perhaps the ‘discussion’ can be managed without too many flame wars breaking out.
[...] agree with them on political issues. Notably, even though close friends (so-called strong ties[1]) are in reality more likely to agree with one another than distant friends, people do not [...]
[...] recent paper by scholars working in Yahoo! Research looked at the extent to which friends on Facebook could accurately predict the degree to which [...]
Hello,
the link to the paper does not seem to work. I can’t download it!
Cheers
@ahuri: Thanks for pointing that out — I fixed the link!
[...] Recently I found a study by Sharad Goel, Winter Mason and Duncan Watts described on a blog called Messy Matters, that explains this reaction. Using Facebook as a data frame, the investigators found that we [...]