Here’s why your friends have more friends than you

The friendship paradox is an observed social phenomenon in which most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. Sometimes, this is stated more strongly. It’s not clear from popular articles about the topic whether the latter statement is generally true. Let’s investigate!

I would have thought this would be difficult to determine, and perhaps this is why it took until 1991 for someone to discover it. In Scott Feld’s original paper, Why your friends have more friends than you do, he suggested that this might be a source of feelings of inadequacy. But, I mean, it’s not like people keep tallies of each of their friends’ friends, let alone a list of their friends, do they? This was probably true in 1991, but now, in the age of Facebook, we can do this with ease — and probably a lot of people do.

How many faces are in my book

In fact, why not? I’ll have a go. I have 374 friends on Facebook. I’m not sure why. Anyway, let’s take ten random friends and count the number of friends that they have. Here’s the tally:

Friend 1 - 522
Friend 2 - 451 
Friend 3 - 735
Friend 4 - 397
Friend 5 - 2074
Friend 6 - 534
Friend 7 - 3607
Friend 8 - 237
Friend 9 - 1171
Friend 10 - 690