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발표자:  Pablo Brañas Garza (Universidad Loyola Andalucía)

주제: Knowing Who Knows Us

장소: 대우관 본관 3층 323호 (송하경홀)

날짜: 11월 25일 화요일 16시 00분 - 17시 20분


Abstract:
Social structures are not only external realities but also cognitive representations within our minds, which may substantially diverge from actual network configurations. Understanding how individuals perceive their social environments therefore requires assessing their ability to accurately recognize their direct relationships. In a previous study (Kovarik et al., PNAS, 2026), we found that participants struggled to assess their own centrality within the network—that is, they were unsure whether their position was relevant—and, even more concerning, were unable to predict their own popularity. This raised the question of whether such poor performance stemmed from the complexity of our measurement approach or from a genuine lack of self-knowledge about one’s social position. In the present work, we radically simplify the elicitation mechanism to minimize computational demands and ensure that observed errors reflect genuine perceptual limitations rather than task complexity. Specifically, participants were asked not only to identify, from a roster, who they considered their friends and enemies, but also to indicate which individuals they believed would nominate them in return as friends or enemies.
To test this, we collected data on both friendships and enmities, as well as beliefs about these ties, from 3,077 students aged 10 to 23 across Spanish secondary schools, vocational programs, and baccalaureate tracks. Considering all link predictions made (17,527 in total), 70.51% of friendships were correctly identified. In contrast, within the network of enmities (5,674 links), only 29.71% of relationships were accurately predicted. Participants thus showed greater precision in identifying friendships than enmities (p < 0.0001, Wilcoxon signed-rank test). Notably, only 0.29% of students accurately recognized all their relationships.
We also found notable heterogeneity: while overall gender differences were absent, same-gender relationships were perceived more accurately than cross-gender ones, and males outperformed females in recognizing cross-gender ties. Network structure further explained variation in perception accuracy: individuals with higher local clustering coefficients in friendship networks were more accurate in recognizing their friends—consistent with denser clusters facilitating mutual awareness—whereas lower clustering in enmity networks was associated with greater accuracy in identifying enemies. Moreover, centrality in enmity networks predicted better recognition of enemies, and centrality in friendship networks also improved accuracy in recognizing enemies, though not in predicting friends.
These findings underscore the cognitive limits of social awareness and highlight the interplay between individual capacities and structural constraints in shaping network perception. The study contributes theoretically by clarifying how social cognition operates within complex relational systems, and methodologically by demonstrating the value of comparing perceived and actual networks to assess the accuracy of social perception.

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