BRAINS Seminar Series: Seeing Less Than There Is: (Mis)perceptions of Social Relationships

We are pleased to launch the BRAINS Online Seminar Series. The first talk will be delivered by Professor Pablo Brañas-Garza (Universidad Loyola Andalucía)

Professor Brañas-Garza is a well-known interdisciplinary researcher in behavioural and experimental economics. His work combines laboratory, field, and large-scale cross-cultural experiments to study cooperation, prosocial behaviour, inequality, and economic decision-making. His research has been published in leading journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and International Economic Review, among others. We believe the seminar topic will be of interest to colleagues across the Faculty.

Co-authors:
Jaromír Kovářík (Universidad del País Vasco & University of West Bohemia, Plzeň)
Frederike Mengel (University of Essex & Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Mónica Vasco (University of Southern California)

Abstract:
Accurate perception of social relationships is central to human social cognition, yet little is known about how well individuals perceive incoming social ties within their natural social environments. We collected data from 3,077 adolescents across 117 classrooms and analysed complete social networks comprising four directed relational layers—friends, best friends, enemies, and worst enemies—alongside adolescents’ predictions of who would nominate them in each layer. Across all layers, perceptual accuracy was strikingly low: only 0.29% of students assessed all of their relationships correctly. Errors were overwhelmingly driven by underestimation; adolescents systematically failed to recognise how many peers named them, both positively and negatively. Misperception was structured rather than random. Popularity (in-degree) was strongly associated with underestimation, whereas sociability (out-degree) was associated with overestimation. These structural patterns were consistent across relational layers and error types and showed no systematic improvement with age. Together, these findings reveal robust structural asymmetries in social cognition, suggesting that young people perceive far less of their social worlds than actually exists.