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research. The data from the “Facebook Only” group indicate that such ties may be
missed by most of a user's friends in the weakest stages, but perceived if that
connection becomes marginally stronger.
Fig. 8 (left)
Compares perceived summed perceived connection intensity based on user
self-reports between the participant and connection members on the x-axis to accuracy on
the z-axis. The y-axis represents the closeness of a user response with 0 being exactly at
baseline. User self-reports are excluded except to provide baseline.
(right).
Compares same
parameters using others' perceptions as baseline. More accurate strength estimates are
found under this second criterion. More research would be necessary to determine if this is
an artifact of the selection algorithm. (n = 518 ratings)
This section has confirmed hypothesis (3), increased user closeness correlates
with improved perceptual accuracy about social networks. It has also proven that
others' perceptions highly correlate with self-reported connections, highlighting
our high performance at memorizing these connections.
4.4 Inter/Intra Clique Comparison
Cliques are clusters of interconnected groups where every user is connected,
defined as a completely connected subgraph. While complete data on the
friendship networks of every user were unavailable, the sampling enacted yielded
a significant fraction of users' friend networks as many overlapped significantly.
Figure 9 confirms Hypothesis(4), and indicates that more research may push it
further, as it indicates that clique accuracy may be inversely proportionate to
clique size, approaching the guessing rate, 0.5, as clique size increases. Inter-
clique accuracy lies below the guessing rate, indicating that participants fell prey
to Janicik and Larrick's transitivity problem in that they assumed offline
connections were indicative of online connection, as many more errors were false
positives than false negatives. It may also result from Facebook's incomplete map
of users' social networks, or users' desire to not share online information with a
subset of their friend group.
