A mathematical law, a century old, explains why your friends are more popular than you.
Have you ever envied the popularity of your friends? Whether you are more or less surrounded, you may have to compare your level of sociability to that of others. With the advent of social networks, this phenomenon tends to become widespread. It is even rather common to fall into the race for likes and followers. But constantly looking at the neighbor, your personal well-being may suffer from it.
For many psychologists, social comparison is a fundamental human tendency. “The comparison can have virtues when, for example, we compare ourselves to someone that we consider superior to you. It can be an engine for ambition. We can want to improve, to progress. But if you go well!”, Explains the psychologist Michael Stora France Inter.
On the other hand, a lack of self -confidence can exacerbate complexes already present. According to A British study Led on more than 10,000 adolescents aged 10 to 15, 40% of girls regularly using social networks had signs of discomfort, depression, sleep disorders and a bad body image.
But these social comparison mechanisms are not limited to psychological aspects. For good reason, they extend to larger dynamics, that mathematics make it possible to model. A striking example: the paradox of friendship. This surprising law, invented by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991, starts from a very simple postulate: people with a large number of friends are more likely to be part of your social circle than those who have little.
Take a group of four people: Max has 8 friends, Tim has 30, Sarah has 5 and Léna has 50. On average, each has 23.25 friends. If you are in place of Sarah or Max, you realize that your friends are much more popular than you. In addition, people with a large circle of friends tend to bias the averages of the networks to which they belong. This is the case of Lena who explodes the statistics by placing the bar too high for the rest of her entourage.