Averages are misleading

Lead author George Cantwell says averages are often highly misleading. Some people are less popular than their friends. Others are more so.

Cantwell and his colleagues developed a new mathematical equation to help researchers understand the paradox of friendship in real-world social networks. They based their equation on two assumptions: 

1. There is a large degree of variation in how many friends people have.
2. Popular people often have popular friends, and unpopular people have unpopular friends. 

Their new equations could explain 95% of the variance.

• The friendship paradox is stronger in social networks that are made up of people with varied popularities.
• Our social circles are biased samples of the population. Generally, it is not appropriate to compare ourselves to our friends....