[The images are small. Blurry if sized up so refer to this for a clear image]
Introduction
We, as humans, are innately social species. Our connections and social interactions contribute to our happiness.
The friendship paradox was introduced in class as a phenomenon where on average, your friends probably have more friends than you do. Intuitively, this makes sense as the popular individuals will belong to more groups and have more people who know them in the network which skews the average up.
I questioned the importance of this.
Does the friendship paradox apply beyond popularity?
Does knowing your friends have more friends than you increase levels of dissatisfaction?
Are popular people just happier than their less social counterparts? If so, why?
Anecdotally, I know of people who have many friends but aren’t satisfied with their social situations. I also know of people who are extremely happy with their small circle of friends.
Before writing this piece, the correlation between happiness and popularity was foggy to me and especially so with social media which plays a contradicting role in today’s society. People will put up modified and inflated perceptions of their happiness which contribute to many individuals experiencing social isolation through comparison.
There are many questions but I will base this post on the following: Does the friendship paradox also suggest your friends are probably happier than you are?
Context
The article cited below explores this concept.
There has been a longitudinal study on a large-scale friendship network of about 39 000 Twitter users. To generate this network, users were selected at random and mutual followings were interpreted as friendships. The largest connected component was then selected. Additionally, to avoid any outliers, users with less than 15 friends were filtered out.
To determine and quantify the happiness of an individual, a sentiment analysis of their recent 3000 tweets (observing frequency and positivity of words) would put them on a “happiness” scale (SWB – Social WellBeing) where 1 represents an individual who is most happy and -1 represents an individual least happy.
Analysis
The network demonstrated the presence of the friendship and happiness paradox (see the following figures). To further add to this result, the happiness paradox was no longer present when using a null model implying that this paradox did not occur by chance and it could show signs of homophily – another topic mentioned in class.
The idea that it could be homophilic leads to the attempt of forming groups.
When plotted out, two groups can be formed which are labeled as the happy and unhappy groups. They illustrate that people tend to cluster based on their level of happiness. Happy people tend to have happy friends and unhappy people tend to have unhappy friends.
From these graphs, it can be interpreted that popular people tend to be happier. There can be many reasons for this. A reason could be that more opportunities for happiness arise in happier people; satiating their social, professional, and personal needs. From the previous point regarding homophily, popular/happy people will also attract their own kind increasing the average happiness and popularity of everyone in the group. The possibilities for this correlation are similar to the idea that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor just in the context of friends.
Among the happy group, a strong friendship paradox is seen with a weak happiness paradox. The opposite is true for the unhappy group where they experience a weak friendship paradox but a strong happiness paradox. In other words, happy people will have friends that are more popular than them but slightly happier than they are. Unhappy people will likely have unhappy friends that will also seem much happier and slightly more popular than them.
Though in general, both groups will experience both paradoxes where you will probably be less popular and less happy than your friends.
Conclusion
It’s important to note that there are limitations that the study has mentioned. A large focus was put on interactions with the social media site which does not always reflect what goes on in an individual’s life. A precise claim to the original prompt can’t be formulated as a result.
However, from the findings presented in this post, I’m convinced that the friendship paradox goes beyond popularity. The paradox can be extended to the happiness paradox where happiness and popularity are correlated.
Concluding that your friends are probably happier than you.
I’m curious to know how you feel about this conclusion. When you open up a social media platform, say, for example, LinkedIn or Instagram, do you feel happy? Perhaps you feel pressured to be more social. Or perhaps you exude immense amounts of confidence and are happy despite how popular/unpopular you are?
Sources
Apicella, Coren L., et al. “Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 25 Jan. 2012, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10736.
Bollen, J., Gonçalves, B., van de Leemput, I. et al. The Happiness Paradox: Your Friends Are Happier than You – EPJ Data Sci. 6, 4 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0100-1
Fowler, James H, and Nicholas A Christakis. “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study.” The BMJ, British Medical Journal Publishing Group, 5 Dec. 2008, https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2338.