Political scientists have known for a while that we're not so good at knowing our friends' political views; we, instead, tend to just think our friends agree with us much more than they actually do.
Why that's the case is a bit of a mystery. One theory is that we hide disagreement from our friends (or even lie a little about our beliefs) when we're in mixed company (especially when we're in the minority) - so it's only natural that when we disagree with our friends they wouldn't know it. Another explanation is that, regardless of how much information or disinformation we have about our friends, we all suffer from "false consensus bias," the tendency to think that others think like us.
Sharad Goel, Winter Mason and Duncan Watts try to pick apart what may be behind our misperceptions in 2010 paper that surveys Facebook friends, but I'm not sure they solve the mystery. (Although I do have a cold so maybe I'm too foggy to see it.)
They do, however, have tons of cool observations and insights.
After looking at 900 pairs of friends, first off, they find that - as we'd expect - friends agree with each other about 75% of the time, which is 12 percentage points higher than random (since you'd expect a random pair in their sample to agree 63% of the time. They also find - again no surprises - that friends tend to overestimate how much they agree with their friends.
Things get interesting when the authors look at differences in those overestimations. They find two things. One, the more we actually disagree with our friends, the more we overestimate how much we agree. Two, the 'closer' we are to friends (ie the more friends we have in common), the less we overestimate our agreement.
The authors puzzle over why we might see those differences: is it because we actually know more about our close friends? Do we likewise share more information with those who we agree with, so we have a better sense of what they believe?
The puzzle, though, might be solved with two assumptions - one of which the authors point out, the other which they miss (although I may have missed their discussion of it). When it comes to overestimating our agreement with those we disagree with, we might just be dealing with a ceiling effect; if agree with someone on 90% of political issues, I can only overestimate our agreement by 10 percentage points, but with someone I agree with 60% of the time there's lots of room for overestimation.
The other explanation is one the authors point to as well: this could all be about false consensus. The authors find that when we agree in reality, we know it 90% of the time (that is, only 10% of the time do we get it wrong and think we disagree). But when we disagree with someone, we only know it 40% off the time! What that means is that if we consistently guess agreement correctly 90% of the time and disagreement 40% of the time, we're going to "correctly" guess agreement with those we agree with more often.
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