Friendship Paradox

You probably have fewer friends than your friends do. This seems counterintuitive, especially
since most people also think they have more friends than their friends do, but its true. In fact, the
average person on Facebook has 245 friends, but the average friend on Facebook has 359.
Why? Its because people who have many friends (i.e. the popular people) are more likely to be
considered among our own friends, which is a sort of sampling bias.
We can consider it mathematically as well:
Person i has friends, and there are n people total. So, the average number of friends that a
person has is:

Next, we consider how many friends the average friend has. Since each of person is friends will
contribute to the total, and person i has friends, the total number of friends person is
friends have is ( )2 . So the average number of friends of friends is the sum of all these terms
divided by the total number of friends:

( )2
xi
Then we can use a trick from statistics. Variance measures how far a set of numbers is spread out.

Variance 2 =

( )2

We can manipulate this to get that

( )2
( 2 + 2 )
2
=
=+
xi

In other words, the average friends of friends = the average number of friends + some number.
So the average number of friends if friends is clearly greater than or equal to the average number
of friends, and theyre only equal if everyone has the same number of friends. This applies to
other networks as well. For example, you will probably have fewer sexual partners than your
sexual partners have.