https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00492-z
Research
Empirically measuring online social influence
1
University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia
2
Thaum, Canberra, Australia
a rohitram96@gmail.com, rohit@thaum.io
Received:
11
March
2024
Accepted:
29
July
2024
Published online:
5
August
2024
Social influence pervades our everyday lives and lays the foundation for complex social phenomena, such as the spread of misinformation and the polarization of communities. A disconnect appears between psychology approaches, generally performed and tested in controlled lab experiments, and quantitative methods, which are usually data-driven and rely on network and event analysis. The former are slow, expensive to deploy, and typically do not generalize well to topical issues; the latter often oversimplify the complexities of social influence and ignore psychosocial literature. This work bridges this gap by introducing a human-in-the-loop active learning method that empirically quantifies social influence by crowdsourcing pairwise influence comparisons. We develop simulation and fitting tools, allowing us to estimate the required budget based on the design features and the worker’s decision accuracy. We perform a series of pilot studies to quantify the impact of design features on worker accuracy. We deploy our method to estimate the influence ranking of 500 X/Twitter users. We validate our measure by showing that the obtained empirical influence is tightly linked with agency and communion, the Big Two of social cognition, with agency being the most important dimension for influence formation.
Key words: Active learning / Psychometrics / Online social networks / Social influence
© The Author(s) 2024
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
