Here’s why your friends have more friends than you

Chris Ferrie
9 min readMar 28, 2024

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…

--

--

Chris Ferrie

Quantum theorist by day, father by night. Occasionally moonlighting as a author. csferrie.com