Groupthink and Peer Pressure: Social Influence in Online Social Network Groups

• Published in: 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining : 20-22 July 2009 pp. 53 - 59
• Main Authors: Pan Hui, Buchegger, S.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.07.2009
• Subjects: Board of Directors; Couplings; Data mining; Educational institutions; Facebook; Joining processes; Network topology; Peer to peer computing; social influence; Social network services; social networks; YouTube
• ISBN: 9780769536897; 0769536891
• DOI: 10.1109/ASONAM.2009.17

In this paper, we present a horizontal view of social influence, more specifically a quantitative study of the influence of neighbours on the probability of a particular node to join a group, on four popular Online Social Networks (OSNs), namely Orkut, YouTube, LiveJournal, and Flickr. Neighbours in OSNs have a mutually acknowledged relation, most often defined as friendship, and they are directly connected on a graph of a social network. Users in OSNs can also join groups of users. These groups represent common areas of interest.We present a simple social influence model to describe and explain the group joining process of users on OSNs. To this end, we extract the social influence from data sets of OSNs of a million sample nodes. One of our findings is that a set of neighbours in the OSN is about 100 times more powerful in influencing a user to join a group than the same number of strangers.