Berlin 2018 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 22: Focus Session: Computational Social Science
SOE 22.2: Talk
Thursday, March 15, 2018, 16:30–16:45, MA 001
Visibility of Minorities in Social Networks — Fariba Karimi2,3, Mathieu Genois2, Claudia Wagner2,3, Philipp Singer2, and •Markus Strohmaier1,2 — 1RWTH Aachen University — 2GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences — 3University of Koblenz-Landau
Homophily can put minority groups at a disadvantage by restricting their ability to establish links with people from a majority group. This can limit the overall visibility of minorities in the network. Building on a Barabási-Albert model variation with groups and homophily, we show how the visibility of minority groups in social networks is a function of (i) their relative group size and (ii) the presence or absence of homophilic behavior. We provide an analytical solution for this problem and demonstrate the existence of asymmetric behavior. Finally, we study the visibility of minority groups in examples of real-world social networks: sexual contacts, scientific collaboration, and scientific citation. Our work presents a foundation for assessing the visibility of minority groups in social networks in which homophilic or heterophilic behaviour is present.