Assessing social influence in an online social network

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Assessing social influence in an online social
network

• Aleks Krotoski
• Dr. Evanthia Lyons
• Dr. Julie Barnett

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Social Influence

• Why do people choose to adopt (attend/distribute)
  information?
• Who do they choose to pass the information to?
• What role do social psychological processes play?

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How does information spread between group members?
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?

?
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• Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion (ELM
  Petty Cacioppo)

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How does information spread between group members?

• Social Learning Theory (Bandura)
• People learn from each other
• People learn through observation of and
  communication with trusted friends
• Conflict-Elaboration Theory (Peres Mugny)
• How does novel information fit in with the
  accepted social norms of the group?
• How would adoption/rejection affect ones
  standing in that group?

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What is SNA?
studies social relationships as a series of
interconnected webs. focuses on
inter-relationships rather than individuals
attributes examines patterns of interaction to
under understand whether, where and how quickly
information spreads through a population
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What SNA offers SP

• A measure of the social context, as defined by
  the actors within that context, rather than the
  researcher
• Identification of key people for use as
  independent variables in social influence
  assessment
• A map of the direction information will spread,
  including rate and possible barriers

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Research Questions

• How do members of an online community best define
  their social networks?
• H1 Amount of communication will indicate degree
  of interpersonal closeness between network actors
• How do social psychological attributes contribute
  to our understanding of the social network
  pathways?
• H2 Participants rated central to the network
  will be viewed as more trustworthy, credible and
  prototypical than peripheral actors, and will be
  the source of the greatest social comparison

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Measuring networks

• Surveys
• Who do you know?
• Who do you communicate with?
• Who do you trust?
• Define your relationship
• Whos trustworthy? (Poortinga Pidgeon, 2003
  Cvetkovich (1999) Renn Levine, 1991)
• Whos credible? (Renn Levine, 1991)
• Who do you compare yourself with? (Lennox
  Wolfe, 1984)
• Whos the most prototypical?

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Results

• N (respondents) 33
• N (total network) 650

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Which scale?

• SNT and SNC scale correlations
• r0.567, plt0.01
• SNT and SPT
• r0.674, p.000
• SNC and SPT
• r0.571, p.000

• Criteria
• Discrete?
• Measuring the right things?

• The Social Network Communication Scale is a more
  discrete measure of a social network in this
  environment, whilst retaining reliable network
  measures
• Instances of communication are the only way for
  Residents to develop interpersonal trust online

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Picking apart the communication network
closeness assumption

• But what does it mean psychologically - if
  someone in this community is rated close or
  distant according communication criteria?
• Multi-Level Modelling

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Results Single explanatory variable (General
Communication)

• The predictive power of the estimate of the value
  of this measure of General Trust is positively
  enhanced when we know how often two people
  communicate in general.

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Single explanatory variable General Trust SNC
categories

• Effect of interpersonal closeness on mode of
  communication (e.g., Garton et al, 1997)
• Offline communication contributes the most to the
  estimate of General Trust. Online public
  communication contributes the least.

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Results Multiple explanatory variables (General
Trust)

• Greatest improvement to the fit of a model occurs
  when offline communication scores are added to
  the single-variable public communication model
• Adding online private communication to the online
  public communication model renders the weight of
  online public communication insignificant, so
  this model is rejected.

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Conclusion

• Online communication is a more robust and
  discrete form of measuring social influence in
  this online community
• The closer people are, the more highly theyre
  rated for social psychological persuasion
  variables
• The more private the communication, the greater
  the levels of potential influence

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Conclusion

• This gives us a better understanding of how
  online social influence may work at this level
• Reiterates similarity between online and offline
  theories of interpersonal interaction.

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Thank you

• A.Krotoski_at_surrey.ac.uk