The “friendship paradox” states that your friends will have more friends than you do.
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This paradox points out that “the average number of friends of friends is always greater than the average number of friends of individuals.”
This paradox is achieved by the fact that not all friends are equal, meaning that more popular people will “contribute disproportionately to the average, since besides [having more friends], they’re named as friends more frequently.”
In a social network setting, a person is counted as a “friend” by each friend he or she has. The more popular the person, the more they are counted. With this in mind, it was found that 93% of Facebook users had fewer friends than their friends did.
Sources
- Friends You Can Count On (Steven Strogatz: Opinionator, The New York Times: September 17, 2012)
- Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do (Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker: September 18, 2012)
