[joelfmi]

Kristina Lerman, a principal scientist at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and her team have found that for most social media users, their feeds expose them to a biased representation of reality.

Recently published in the scientific journal “Nature Communications,” their research paper “Friendship Paradox Biases Perceptions in Directed Networks” highlights how the structure of modern social networks leads to perception bias, or the fact that a person’s connections often skew their perception of how prevalent a trait or belief is in society.

Lerman’s paper shows that when popular people engage in an activity or possess a certain trait, perception bias causes others to perceive this trait or behavior as much more prevalent than it actually is.

“An individual’s perception of a trait is shaped by its local prevalence among his or her friends,” the paper said. “Any trait that is correlated with popularity is likely to be misperceived.”

Lerman and her team didn’t make this discovery by accident. Their new paper builds upon Lerman’s previous research into the structure of social networks. Her past work, which focused on proving certain structural qualities of these networks, laid the foundation for this new study of perception bias.

Perception bias can apply to something as trivial as having red hair or as significant as opinions on vaccination.