Scrolling through your social media, trying to understand why you feel left out while everyone else seems to be doing great. A friend seems to be getting married in a tropical location, some estranged friend has become a celebrity, and even your colleagues seem to be flourishing.
It is normal to feel like you are being left out and feeling like you have no relevance in this social media saturated existence. This is termed as ‘Friendship Paradox’.
This state of existence is troublesome for sure, when you are being dominated by facts such as most of your friends have more friends than you. Hilariously and sadly, people do not know that they are experiencing a paradox.
Blessed with friends who are well known and famous in society? It can work to your benefit and boost your self esteem, the world out there is dark enough already. However, it is troubling to constantly ask yourself about why the digital society has such a skewed perception of friendship.
The paradox profoundly uncovers a bias that exists within the society such as revealing why it is classic for people to feel left out and empty in what seems to be a tightly interconnected world. Even the single most antisocial people are thought to be surrounded by well known people, so why not shift the topic to mental health and society?
The Friendship paradox surely provokes an intriguing debate about friendship by transcending individuals to understand the science and psychology that this paradox holds deep.
Origins and Discovery: The Birth of a Paradox
The Friendship Paradox originated from a ‘puzzling’ yet simple question: Do your friends have more friends compared to you? At first glance, that statement does not seem as odd, but it can make most people raise their eyebrows in disbelief. In 1991 Scott Feld published a paper Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You, and by looking through classroom surveys, he found that 84% of students had fewer friends compared to their average friend.
Key Insight: Social networks are structured such that their visibility is amplified for their highly connected individuals, meaning social circles are explicitly not random. For instance, if Alice has 100 friends, while Bob has only 2, then when calculating averages, Alice’s popularity skews the results. A lot of people claim making new friends as Alice’s name appears in the list of all 100 friends while Bob only has 2.
However, with the boom of social media, Youtube, and Twitter, people got more curious about his research and the friendship paradox as people started to notice how common it actually was to have more friends than their friends.
The Mathematics Behind the Paradox: Networks and Skewed Realities
To understand the Friendship Paradox we have to look at network phenomena. Social networks are scale-free, which means that a majority of the population have few connections while some “hubs” have many. This causes the distribution to take a power-law shape (refer to Figure 1).
The Numbers Don’t Lie:
- Mean vs. Median: Let’s say you question 100 people about their friends. The median value might be 150, and due to outliers, the mean is 300.
- Friends of Friends:You are drawing ‘friendship’ from a population that over-samples the hubs. Think of a party where social butterfly who engages in every conversation is more likely to be regarded as a “friend” by the attendees.
Real-World Manifestations: From Facebook to Pandemics
The mid social inequality is commonplace across our societies and extends to our online world too – it’s not just an afterthought; it is fundamental.
Social Media: The Illusion of Perfection
An MIT study in 2018 examined 5 million Twitter accounts and discovered 90% of users had lower follower counts than the accounts they followed. Furthermore, on Facebook, friends usually have an average of 25% more friends than the users do. This results in a highlight reel effect, where users feel they appear to be more connected and happy than they truly are.
Academic Collaborations
In academia, a few scientists tend to co-author most of the papers, decorating everyone else. There was a publication in 2020 by PNAS that showed mid-career scientists have collaborators that cut the majority of the publications, which leads to imposter syndrome.
Public Health
This explanation was offered during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to make sense of the phenomenon called super spreaders. More often than not, people have been exaggerating the phenomenon regarding these ‘super spreaders’ implying that if you do look at a random sample of people who test positive, there’s a higher chance that their contacts will be super spreaders, that is, people who work for example in grocery shops, hence being at the center of the hub will accelerate the rate of infection transfer.
Psychological and Societal Implications: The Cost of Comparison
The Friendship Paradox could be detrimental to one’s mental well-being and overall social behavior.
The Envy Machine
Social media is designed to exploit over comparison by the use of Paradox. It works because ever-increasing audience-centric users (referred to as “influencers”) are given precedence by the algorithms. These omnipresent users are also present on multiple social media platforms. Excessive use of social media was found to be detrimental to one’s mental health, as per the research conducted at Computers in Human Behavior in 2017.
Distorted Norms
Everyone assumes that their peers are more successful, leading to a spiral of reckless behavior as people seek to attempt to “get ahead.” To gain self validation, teenagers tend to post risqué pictures or drink alcohol.
Political Polarization
Activists tend to dominate conversations, leading to the growth of online echo “bubbles.” Use of Twitter is skewed since there is an overwhelming volume of political content with only 6% of accounts producing 73% of that content, as shown by 2021 “Nature” research. This changed users’ perception of public opinion.
Counterarguments and Limitations: When the Paradox Fails
The Friendship Paradox isn’t universal. Exceptions include:
- Close-Knit Networks: In small, egalitarian groups (e.g., families), friend counts are more uniform.
- Active vs. Passive Users: On LinkedIn, job seekers (active users) connect widely, but most users are passive, reducing the paradox’s effect.
- Intentional Design: Some platforms, like Mastodon, limit follower counts to prevent hub formation.
Navigating the Paradox: Strategies for a Healthier Social Life
The primary strategy against the paradox is promotion: understanding is a big step:
- Quality Over Quantity: a principle that guides Dunbar’s number: humans can sustana practically 150 relationships which are deeper.
- Curate Your Feed:Follow accounts that present different perspectives and do not make you feel envy.
- Offline Connections:people tend to interact in real life and these types of relations are less majority for online dysphoria.
Embracing the Invisible Hand of Networks
The Friend Paradox paints a picture of the underlying structure of human relationships indeed.
It tells us being popular does not make one a better person and the digital realm is a skewed reality. By deciphering the digits in social existence we can now be in control. Build societies where genuineness is prioritized over numbers.
So the next time you are frustrated by the lavish life of your acquaintances, ITQ: It’s not you but the network.
