Introducing Friend Measure
How well do you know your friends? We have created a really fun game on Facebook that lets you measure just that. It’s called Friend Measure.
Here’s how Friend Measure works: every week Friend Measure asks you and your friends a question. For example:
Q: If the teller at your bank gave you an extra $1,000 and you could take it and never get caught, would you?
A: Yes
B: No
Here’s the twist: not only do you answer for yourself, but Friend Measure also asks you predict what your friends would answer as well. Once you’ve made your predictions, Friend Measure calculates your “Friend Score,” which lets you know how well you really know your friends. If you think about it, this “friend score” can tell us a lot about the kinds of questions we’re asking. So far we’ve found some really surprising results.
For example: we asked “Can you tell the difference between wine that costs about $10 a bottle and one that costs about $40 a bottle?” 75% of respondents admitted, no, they can’t tell the difference. Even more surprising though, is that they thought that about 58% of their friends could tell the difference. Respondents’ overall accuracy for predicting their friends was 53%, which is basically no better than chance.
Here’s one in which users were really good at predicting their friends’ responses: we asked, “Do you think that increasing the tax rate for the wealthy by 10% will get rich people to work less?” Respondents were 84% accurate in guess their friends’ responses, because we typically know our friends’ political affiliations really well.
From time to time, I’ll be sharing interesting findings like these here, but only if you participate! Enjoy!
The Upside of Irrationality, explores some positive and some negative ways that irrationality plays out in our lives.
What came to mind is the FB game of 21 questions about your friends, which (to me) are kinds of questions where you answer that your friend is a good person or not a good person. The answers are then sent to your friend. On the rare occasion where you might believe the “bad” choice is more applicable, I don’t imagine anyone truthfully answering the question. A long intro to say, I wonder when it comes to honesty in an FB app, how much truthfulness there will be about our friends’ truthfulness…?
Dan -
I love the recursive nature of the game. These questions cover a range of required friend knowledge – morality, palette sophistication, motivation. So the accuracy is likely a function of a range of variables, including the complexion of your Facebook friends. One person might have more business-skewed relationships, others more personal ones. So it might be worthwhile to ask a screening question. Or questions. Also would be interesting to segment by age and gender.
Adam
I don’t do facebook simply because it is a la la land of fake people interacting with multitudes of other fake people and sadly, enjoying that interaction over real life friendship.
Unless you know the person really well as a friend in real life, it is likely you know nothing of the person, regardless of what you “think” you know. Answering ethical questions for those you do not really know makes for interesting results how? Of course it is no better than chance.
Being many of the youth on facebook make fake accounts, any results you get from there are likely faked. I know 2 teens who admitted having 100 fake accounts each to increase their own friend lists. There are many adults who do the same for self aggrandizing… as even Sarah Palin was caught doing.
I wouldn’t find any results from that medium at all interesting, fun or useful, given that knowledge.
hsvkitty, I don’t think you’re being fair to the vast majority of Facebook users. I bet that more than half of all people 14-40 years old have a Facebook account, and that most of them don’t have fake accounts. Even if they do, those accounts are probably inactive and wouldn’t feed data into this study, because nobody actually uses them.
Many people use Facebook as a communication tool to supplement real life interaction, not replace it. For those people, most of their Facebook friends are people who they do have (or have had) significant interaction with in real life, and thus their guesses would be meaningful. Don’t assume that everyone else is like you or your social circle.
Your works always amaze me!! I am a big fan of irrationality of human behavior, and I believe there’s a pattern that we can control and manipulate to drive it toward the equilibrium we think is rationally desirable. Well, I just wanna point out one thing in Friend Measure game(FM game). It is a great idea not only in a way that we come to know how well we have known our friends, but also in other way that we come to understand human behavior after all. From the 53% of the outcome, I admit it is easy to conclude it’s no better than pure chance. However, there’s a caveat, for people are irrational, and biased at the same time. To say, I suggest questions in FM game are better off with baselilne. To set up the baseline, I think each question needs to be prepared in two versions. First: questions on general population. Second: questions about one of the friends, which you used. First format will be answered by people such as ‘when I see the people, I think it’s 50:50′, or ‘for me, I am pretty sure most of the people would accept it, say 90:10?’. The average of ratio from those answers could be considered approximate accuracy by bias, or ‘chance’, because it is the number they would give out when they think of random person in this society, not one particular person, a friend. From that baseline, each FM question could be effective in judging if they really know who their friends are.
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I admit this idea needs some finishing. My point is that most of FM questions aren’t working by pure chance, but by bias, viewpoint on world.
The trouble with surveys and stats reliability and accuracy is that if you ask 100, 1000 or 1 million people a q that only has one definately ‘YES’ response – such as – do you think that ultimately every living thing eventually dies or does night always follow day ( or visa versa) – You will virtually always get a significant 15% that answer NO AND 7% that answer DON’T KNOW – if theres an option for that..;-)