The Friendship Paradox and Social Network Participation

Abstract

The friendship paradox implies that, on average, a person will have fewer friends than their friends do. Prior work has shown how the friendship paradox can lead to perception biases regarding behaviors that correlate with the number of friends: for example, people tend to perceive their friends as being more socially engaged than they are. Here, we investigate the consequences of this type of social comparison in the conceptual setting of content creation (“sharing”) in an online social network. Suppose people compare the amount of feedback that their content receives to the amount of feedback that their friends’ content receives, and suppose they modify their sharing behavior as a result of that comparison. How does that impact overall sharing on the social network over time? We run simulations over model-generated synthetic networks, assuming initially uniform sharing and feedback rates. Thus, people’s initial modifications of their sharing behavior in response to social comparisons are entirely driven by the friendship paradox. These modifications induce inhomogeneities in sharing rates that can further alter perception biases. If people’s responses to social comparisons are monotonic (i.e., the larger the disparity, the larger the modification in sharing behavior), our simulations suggest that overall sharing in the network gradually declines. Meanwhile, convex responses can sustain or grow overall sharing in the network. We focus entirely on synthetic graphs in the present work and have not yet extended our simulations to real-world network topologies. Nevertheless, we do discuss practical implications, such as how interventions can be tailored to sustain long-term sharing, even in the presence of adverse social-comparison effects.

This research was completed as part of the author’s employment at Meta. The author is currently employed at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s NeuroAI Group.