Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You

In 2012, Pew Research found that while the typical Facebook user had 245 Facebook friends, the average *friend* someone has on Facebook had 359.

That sounds completely illogical at first. But it’s explained by the “friendship paradox,” a term resulting from sociologist Professor Scott Feld’s 1991 paper.

The phenomenon has since been translated into mathematical theories.

But what exactly is this “friendship paradox”, and what does it actually mean for our social lives?

In a Purdue University video, Prof Feld said he was “surprised” to find “that it’s always true in social networks that friends in general have more friends on average than people do”.

If that sounds a bit like a head-scratcher, well, it is (hence the “paradox” part).

“People assume that if there’s a pair of friends, one must have more friends and the other must have [fewer] friends, so you would expect that half the people would have fewer friends than their friends,” he continued.

But instead, he said, some people have loads of friends, and naturally, those people are likelier to be friends with lots of people who have fewer friends than them.

And the other people who have fewer friends are less likely to be our mates.

In other words, it’s not so much that most people hover around an average amount of friends, with some having slightly more than others. Instead, very extroverted people throw the balance off a lot (a bit like counting billionaires when calculating people’s net worth).

“Each of us seems to be thinking that our friends have more friends than we do, which they, in fact, do, because our friends are the people who are friends with everybody,” said Prof Feld.

Later analysis found that the mathematical premise of the “friendship paradox” seems to bear out in real life.

Well, Professor Feld said, one takeaway could be to remember that comparing yourself to your mates isn’t really a great indicator of your true standing: we should try to remember that this sample is “biased”.

Secondly, on a broader level, it means some people could spread more of anything – from ideas to disease and misinformation – than the average person might, meaning more of us are influenced than influencing.

“So if you want to stop the spread of a pandemic,” Prof Feld continued, “you really would like to vaccinate people’s friends more than you’d want to vaccinate random people.”

The same goes for switching people onto a certain product. Basically, whatever spread you want to create, track, or predict, you’re better off looking at other people’s mates’ habits than their own.