The ‘Friendship Paradox’: You Probably Don’t Have As Many Friends As Your Friends Do

Humans in general maintain fewer close friendships today than in previous generations, but you in particular probably have fewer friends than your own friends do.

What’s going on?

First things first, there’s nothing wrong with you as a person (we’d love to be your friend!) and this “friendship paradox” applies to almost everyone.

Let’s try to make sense of it by picturing a room with 9 people inside. Each person has 2 friends, so the paradox isn’t relevant — until a super popular 10th person strolls in and makes friends with 6 people.

Now we’re left with much different math:

• The three who aren’t friends with #10 have 2 friends, but each of their friends now has 3.
• The 6 who are friends with #10 now have 3 friends, but their friends have an average of 3.7.
• The only one not impacted by the paradox is #10, who has 6 friends, each of whom only has 3.

It’s not just friendships

As the example shows, it only takes one particularly popular person to skew the average for everyone else. And social media is a great place to see this play out since there are often small groups of people with a disproportionately large network of connections.

One study found that 87% of Facebook users had fewer friends than their friends did, which is just about the same rate as the hypothetical room discussed above.

And we can also see this demonstrated in all sorts of other connections … including rail lines. A look at Europe’s Eurail service, for example, reveals that each city is connected to an average of 2.7 other cities even though their neighbors are linked to 3.8.

That’s because a few destinations with many more connections are throwing off the average for every other city.

Chris Agee December 14th, 2023

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