MBS 93-15
Systematic Biases in Social Perception
Ece Kumbasar, A. Kimball Romney, William Batchelder

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Members of a professional group reported on friendship ties among all members, including themselves. Multiple methods of analyses reveal several systematic biases. In spatial representations individuals place themselves nearer the centroid of the group than do other group members; using graph-theoretic centrality measures, they tend to have highest centrality in their own digraphs; and the group members tend to report more ties, more reciprocated ties, and more transitive triples among those they report, as opposed to those they do not report, as friends. Despite these individual biases correspondence analysis provides a valid group level representation of the friendship network.