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Monophily in social networks introduces similarity among friends-of-friends

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 284–290 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

The observation that individuals tend to be friends with people who are similar to themselves, commonly known as homophily, is a prominent feature of social networks. While homophily describes a bias in attribute preferences for similar others, it gives limited attention to variability. Here, we observe that attribute preferences can exhibit variation beyond what can be explained by homophily. We call this excess variation monophily to describe the presence of individuals with extreme preferences for a particular attribute possibly unrelated to their own attribute. We observe that monophily can induce a similarity among friends-of-friends without requiring any similarity among friends. To simulate homophily and monophily in synthetic networks, we propose an overdispersed extension of the classical stochastic block model. We use this model to demonstrate how homophily-based methods for predicting attributes on social networks based on friends (that is, 'the company you keep') are fundamentally different from monophily-based methods based on friends-of-friends (that is, 'the company you’re kept in'). We place particular focus on predicting gender, where homophily can be weak or non-existent in practice. These findings offer an alternative perspective on network structure and prediction, complicating the already difficult task of protecting privacy on social networks.

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Fig. 1: Overdispersion in attribute preferences.
Fig. 2: Homophily and monophily across a population of friendship networks.
Fig. 3: Four different oSBMs and the associated performance of one-hop and two-hop classifiers.
Fig. 4: Predicting gender, political affiliation and terrorist group affiliation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Fosdick, J. Kleinberg, I. Kloumann, D. Larremore, J. Nishimura, M. Porter, M. Salganik and S. Way for helpful comments. We thank attendees of the 2016 International Conference on Computational Social Science and the 2016 SIAM Workshop on Network Science for comments. This work was supported in part by the Department of Defense (DoD) through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) programme, the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Engineering Fellowship and a David Morgenthaler II Faculty Fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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  1. Management Science and Engineering Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kristen M. Altenburger & Johan Ugander

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K.M.A. and J.U. designed and performed the research and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Johan Ugander.

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Supplementary Notes 1–4, Supplementary Figures 1–22, Supplementary Tables 1–3, Supplementary References 1–18

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Altenburger, K.M., Ugander, J. Monophily in social networks introduces similarity among friends-of-friends. Nat Hum Behav 2, 284–290 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0321-8

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