Mistakes Your Intuition Makes: The Friendship Paradox — WHY your friends’ have More friends’ than You

Mark Stens Land
7 min readJan 24, 2018

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You read that title correctly. Let me explain this strange paradox…

Is it apparent how we are all influenced by acquaintances and friends? Truth be told, our social observations are not as accurate as we imagine. The emotional stories we seemingly observe fool us, and the intuitions we craft might not be as concrete as we logically figure.

We’re all very capable of failing to observe reality, online.

For instance, have you ever felt like other people had more friends than you? Many of us have felt this way. In fact, on average, our friends’ have more friends’ than the typical person in a population. In other words, this is what sociologist Steven Feld refers to as the “friendship paradox.” The fact that your friends’ have more friends’ than you — is an empirical observation.

Compare the number of friends’ one person has to the average number of friends their friends’ have — and the second number is always larger. Most of us only have a few friends’, and some people have tons of friends. The popular friends create the paradoxical effect. These are also the people that tend to be outgoing and accepting of others across the board. In a school lunchroom, for example, these popular influencers are the hubs that connect different campy, close-minded groups of people — that might not interact with one another, if it wasn’t for these “connectors” (i.e. hubs, nodes, etc…).

These friendly types propel the average number of friends up in lots of other individuals’ social networks, because they are connected to so many other social networks.

For Example, Sue has the most friends’ and is driving the average up among the group. The number located above each particular name indicates how many friends’ each girl has. The number in parentheses is the average number of friends’ her friends’ have.

Everyone aside Sue and Alice, who happen to be the popular girls, have fewer friends’ than their friends’ do.

In terms of sexual intimacy, the people one has had sex with, typically have been with more people than you (i.e. My intuition can be fooling me here. I’m sure we can cook-up some numbers to back up the assumptions though;). In other words, I think, the more partners someone has — the more likely they are to eventually become your partner. We all tend to prefer individuals possessing more attractive qualities than the ones with less.

In equal measure, the people you follow on social media are probably popular — which means, the people you follow more than likely have more followers than you, because people like to follow influencers/popular people.

When we compare different characteristics about ourselves like income, happiness, popularity, intelligence, reputation, et cetera, to our friends, our ideas about ourselves warp — and thusly make us feel bad about ourselves. Moreover, many studies show that heavy online social network users are less happy than lighter users. These researchers think that when we are continually jingled with notification updates from biased samples of friends that are more popular and seemingly happy, it can be the reason for our anxieties and depression.

How does our intuition make errors?

What’s worse, when we are drinking and then going online — we are especially harming our mental health. Take it from me: I’m still trying to relinquish the embarrassment I’ve caused myself over the years, from drinking and engaging on social media. On the positive side, I like to think that I’ve created some great humor for people, at my expense, haha.

If you’ve ever observed me completely hammered, from drinking, online — you’re probably pointing fingers at me, for example, as being one of these less mentally developed fools. Drinking alone, online, and then waking up the next morning rattled with anxiety, depression, and compunction can really mess with your head. (Trust me: I go to counseling 3 times a week!, and have completely stopped drinking altogether, haha.)

We’re very capable of seeing biased samplings of wealth and happiness on social media platforms. Meaning, your friends are more likely to post positive stuff more than you. In turn, our point of view impacts how we perceive ourselves. Everything on social media is amplified. (We know this.)

What’s unusual is how people magnify how they feel as “social facts,” based on anecdotal stories they see in large swaths of time. In other words, just think about the people that think they’re sharing social facts; when in reality they’re just simply spending a lot of time narrowly focusing on particular things.

Intelligent people do this to me all the time! They don’t realize that they are perpetuating “stories” they staunchly subscribe to in echo chambers. If they’ve read it and felt it, through time, they count it as intuition.

I mean…Am I crazy, or are a lot of intelligent people delusional? Are these intelligent people, with story facts, reading the whole internet!?

Taken together, don’t get sad about the fact that everyone’s friends have more friends than you do ;) Try to understand that if one of the greatest psychologists of our time has trouble with trusting his intuition –we too might also run the risk of making the wrong gut-decisions, that we think are 100% correct.

How Daniel Kahneman admits he fools himself sometimes:

There is a clear boundary — when you know you can trust your intuitions, and when you cannot. (i.e. Intuition is basically recognition. Like a child recognizing a cat, or a human recognizes a tree — it’s immediate.)

According to Daniel Kahneman learning about your intuition can be summarized through 3 conditions:

1st- In order to comprehend patterns, and reality, the world has to be regular enough so that there are regularities to be picked up upon.

2nd- And then you have to have enough exposure to those regularities to have a chance to learn them.

3rd- Intuition depends on the time between, when you are making a guess and when you get feedback (the time must be rapid).

That said, if these three conditions are satisfied –then people develop intuition. It can also be the case that people develop intuition despite these three conditions. In other words, people have ideas that they process — in which they think are correct. We all know and recognize these people;) We like to feel confident. We like to tell ourselves stories.

Despite our confidence in understanding, it’s not always best to trust our intuition. Thoughts that come to our mind are not always correct, in other words. Feelings can highjack the truth of the matter.

Knowing what pisses someone off into action, or inspires them with joy — is the stuff that delights a copywriter.

According to Kahneman, “We have intuitions when it comes to gains and we have intuitions when it comes to loses…When you strip out either of these, we are at a loss — in that there are no intuitions.” If I was to ask you to make a decision between supporting your community or a dying group of people in another community, what would your moral intuition decide? Would there be an emotional bias that feeds into how you make an intuitive choice as to what is “right.”

P.S. →Here’s a random article I’ve been thinking about from my past:

Do You Allow People to Treat you like a Replaceable Commodity?

I’m striving to tear down those social norms that force me to believe that I need to live a compartmentalized life. Meaning, I need to be working to have my job in one drawer; my friends in another; and different settings online/offline, in public, in another separated place.

The way I plan to pull this off: working in an environment that reflects my lifestyle. I love learning and writing about people and society. And, now I’m in a place where I can afford to take a risk and unshackle myself from the centralized dominion of a stultifying 9–5. I’m no longer a prostitute!

The things I love about work should align with what I value and care about: my purpose for living. Some bosses don’t want to listen to this. Most companies I’ve worked for don’t invest in the tribes of their community. The purpose is to be a reverent worker-bee. Everyone lacks purpose; there exists no great mission.

In my humble opinion: every organization needs to be building a movement! — that solves real problems, rippling optimism, creating waves of purpose.

That said, this begs the question: why do I even work?

— Provide for my privations

— Get better at understanding human behavior (i know — sounds weird to put this down on paper..err..on the screen, i mean)

— Be apart of something greater than myself and the team and organization

— Have fun; playing with challenging projects; word-smithing; connecting with humans; serving clients by solving big problems

It’s all about building and growing meaningful relationships. However, a lot of jobs I’ve had in the past, my co-workers and bosses hated their jobs (which is pretty much 80% our life.). Sad — I know.

Why?

Because, we as humans come into this world as “social” beings. Being social is the only thing that matters in life. Period. We are dependent on each other. Benefit from each other. Become greater individuals because of each other. Because of all this, it’s not a surprise that our social perspective determines our happiness.

The rugged self-made man is becoming an absurd idea. The boss that welds all the power and takes no advice, and can’t learn from his team — is a nightmare to work with! Giving and taking is a two-way street — no matter what the hierarchy dictates.

All the more, It’s refreshing to find that there are great conversationalists in the world. These are the people I love working with! They don’t wait for you to finish talking to impose their notions down your throat. We take turns learning from each other.

Sometimes, it’s healthy to take a step back and ponder why ‘fear’ is coming from in an organization?….

I suspect it’s because there is a lack of give-and-take. A lack of listening. A lack of leadership to humble oneself, and let our team teach us. It’s uncomfortable — but that’s what makes us leaders.

In all aspects of life today and into the future, the alliances we build and the communities we join will determine our scenery. Our success depends on the ways we engage with optimistic people.

Give-and-take. Live and learn!

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Mark Stens Land
Mark Stens Land

Written by Mark Stens Land

NewMexicanPizza.com (Is my bold, audacious project, and meaningful retirement/side-hustle goal, that sells: Books, Merch, Hornos, Pizza Flakes Blends, etc…)

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