The research was led by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, who is very much into working out how we make desicions. His prior work has shown that the friends we choose may in part be down to genetics; for example people with a gene related with alcoholism seemed to stick together.

For this work on Facebook and voting, he and his colleagues were interested in examining the claim that online social networks influence offline decision-making – which is trotted out regularly by those working in advertising on social networks, but so far has not been qualified.

Prof. Fowler told the BBC:

There’s been a lot of work in online social networks showing that app adoption can spread from person to person, and there’s been a lot of work in the real world showing that things like obesity and drinking and smoking can spread from person to person, but there hasn’t been any work that showed what happens online affects the real world.

To find an answer to this question, Prof Fowler’s team got Facebook to post a non-partisan “social” message along the top of 61 million users’ pages, including a reminder that it was voting day, a clickable “I voted” button, a link to information about nearby polling places, and a list of up to six of the users’ friends who had already clicked the button.

About 600 000 users were shown an alternate, “informational” message, identical except for the absence of the friends data. A further 600 000 were shown no message at all.

The data on which users sought polling station data or clicked the “I voted” button could then be cross-correlated with publicly available data on who actually went to cast a vote.

The results showed to a high statistical significance that those who received the “social” message were more than 2% more likely to report having voted and 0,4% more likely to actually vote than those shown the “informational” message.

And users were 0,22% more likely to vote for each “close” friend – as measured by the degree of Facebook interaction – who received the message.

By correlating the findings with polling data and comparing with the “no-message” case, the team estimate that the message resulted in more than 340 000 extra votes being cast.

Prof Fowler admitted that his reearch with Facebook didn’t win anyone an election, but that sometimes numbers like this could make the difference. He commented:

I doubt it changed the outcome of the overall election, but it’s posssible it had an impact on local elections. There are certainly circumstances in our history where a far smaller number of votes would have mattered: in 2000 in the US the presidential election was decided by just 537 votes in Florida.

Previously there has always been the problem of homophily: the idea that we make our friends  – in real life or online – with those that we share significant similarities.  Prof. Fowler explains what this means to this research:

If we were just going to do an observational study where we just looked at the network to see whether or not people who voted tend to be connected to others who voted, we wouldn’t know if that was because they tended to become friends because they both like politics or if one friend influences another. . . the beauty of this experiment is that we can rule that out as an explanation for what we found.

In this experiment we were able to show that if you just looked at the users and whether or not the message directly affected them you’d be missing the whole story; for every user that changed their behaviour, there were four friends who changed their behaviour.

In other words, the network quadrupled the effect of the ‘get out the vote’ message.

It’s impressive research for an idea that while taken for granted, had not really been proved. It shows how much of an effect peer influence has online, and how important social media has become for political parties or anyone trying to influence decision-making.

So yes, we’re still sheep.

[Source: BBC]