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NotSanguine writes:

MedicalXpress is reporting on new research [Abstract only; full article pay-walled, but available for free (PDF)] into the "Friendship Paradox", as published (online) in the journal Psychological Science by researchers at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

The MedicalXpress article says, in part:

Social scientists have long known that, statistically speaking, our friends are probably more popular than we are. It's a simple matter of math: Because extraverted people tend to have more friends, they are disproportionately represented in social networks—which means everyone's network is more extraverted than the population as a whole.

New research by researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College extends this so-called "friendship paradox" beyond a purely mathematical claim, documenting the phenomenon within the emerging social networks of a new class of MBA students. Not only did the researchers show that extraversion bias exists in real-world networks, they found the effect is more pronounced in the networks of socially outgoing people. In other words, popular people are not immune from the friendship paradox—they experience it more intensely than others.

[...] "If you're more extraverted, you might really have a skewed view of how extraverted other people are in general," Feiler says. "If you're very introverted you might actually have a pretty accurate idea."

[...] The rest of us view our social world through a distorted lens—a kind of carnival mirror that makes us feel less loved than our friends, and creates the impression that others are more social than they truly are. This could have profound effects on our job performance, relationships and self-esteem.

"There's a tendency to wonder, 'am I normal?'" Feiler says. "And our research suggests that you're probably more normal than you think."

Does this mean that we, as a species, are less social than we think?

Now get off my lawn!