CANCELLED

Title: The Illusion of Majority in Social Networks

Abstract: The popularity of an opinion in one’s direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one’s entire community. For instance, when confronted with a majority of opposing opinions in one’s circles, one might get the impression that one belongs to a minority. From this perspective, network structure makes local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate. However, the way a social network is wired also determines what kind of information distortion can actually occur. In this talk, I will discuss which classes of networks allow for large groups of agents to have a wrong impression about the distribution of opinions in the network. We focus on the case where agents are wrong about the majority opinion, that is, they are under ‘majority illusion’, and generalize to other types of illusions. (This is joint work with Maaike Venema-Los and Davide Grossi.)

The seminar will held online on March 12th at 14:30 (Rome time) on the Microsoft Teams platform, here.