Voting and Influence

Fist of all, I want to thank my 4^th year students from 2012-2014 who participated in the voting experiments. No harm was done to them. Also, please note that you may not use any information found on this page without my consent.

04.11.2014

Methodology

Small test groups of students (~10-20) are asked to vote for two other colleagues that are physically present within the same group. Thus, each node (student) has out-degree equal to 2 (outgoing votes) and in-degree depending on the received votes (can be 0). The voting intentions are spoken out publicly, not written down on paper.

Observations

This experiment facilitates a study on ad-hoc social network formation by highlighting:

• 1. The impact of existing friendships in the voting process (friends will vote friends, but team members will vote their team members first).

  2. The impact of topological placement (neighbors on left/right side are predominantly voted).

  3. The influence

It also offers a perspective on social-psychology traits by highlighting:

• 1. The obedience and reciprocity of team members who were already voted by their team mates. Is is an obligation or responding to a positive favor ?

  2. The influence of the voting winner(s) correlated with the physical and relational topologies.

Results

The displayed results are anonymized due to ethical reasons. The graphics are generated in Gephi.

Three groups of sizes 10, 25 and 15 students were used.

• Degree and community structure

Legend: node size is direct proportional to the node in-degree (number of received votes) and node color represents the community to which the node belongs to.

• Betweenness centrality

Legend: node size and color are direct proportional to the node betweenness (a node's importance in terms of controlling communication).

• Pagerank and gender

Legend: node size is direct proportional to the node Pagerank (relative influence) and node color represents the gender of the student (male, female).

• Topographic overview of results

Legend: node size is direct proportional to the node in-degree (number of received votes) and node color represents the community to which the node belongs to. The layout is that to the laboratory in which the experiments were done.

(C) You may not use any information found on this page without my consent.

For any questions contact me at alext [at] cs.upt.ro