Social influence is a well-known phenomenon that individuals and groups experience through their social interactions. there are multiple aspects of social influence. Individuals may feel pressured to practice some behaviors or follow some beliefs influenced by their close social circle. People also get affected by the emotions of others surrounding them. Some people use the expressions, happiness is in the air, or depression is in the air to express their perception of a surrounding emotion.
With the prevalence of online social platforms, many questions arise regarding how social influence is shaped, and how it affects and/or is affected by real-life social interactions. In their work A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization, Bond et al. studied the effect of social influence on encouraging people to vote in elections. Their experiment consisted of conveying a message to individuals through their Facebook Newsfeed that encourages them to vote and let others know that they did. The message also showed some of an individual’s friends who already voted. Their results indicate a significant influence on an individual when he knows that people in his close circle have taken an action, pressuring him to take a similar action.
In another study titled Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, the core data science team at Facebook showed how a decrease in posts with positive emotions in someone’s Newsfeed rendered him less positive, while a decrease in posts with negative emotions rendered him less negative. Their work presented an experimental evidence of the phenomenon known as emotional contagion.
The two aforementioned studies analyze two different aspects of social influence and how they are shaped in online social platforms. My reflection on these studies could be summarized in the following points:
- A common point between the two studies is that both provide a perspective on how to interpret the effect size. An effect size that may seem small in an experiment on a tiny subset of a giant social platform such as Facebook should be taken into consideration given how the aggregate effect could be.
- The first study claims that the influence of close friends (strong ties) is much significant than the influence of other friends (weak ties) where the number of interactions is much less. I would be interested to study the influence of social media public figures which some people like to call them social influencers. These social influencers may have a significantly large number of apparently weak ties, however, their aggregate effect is more significant than smaller number of strong ties.
- Given some experimental evidence on some aspects of social influence, it is interesting to study how this influence could be used for opinion manipulation. During the Arab Spring uprisings, social media played a pivotal role in shaping the public opinion, which I believed contributed significantly to today’s outcome in many countries, e.g. Egypt.
- The emotional contagion study refuted the claim that a trending positivity in the Newsfeed may lead to a negative effect on an individual. However, it is hard to conclude this from only the outcome of this study, as there might be another perspective where an individual is pressured to act positively to comply with the trend.
