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!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 07 2015, @11:32AM
Does this mean that we, as a species, are less social than we think?
Than we appear, at least by total noise volume per source.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @12:11PM
And if you are extremely introverted you have no idea how introverted or extroverted people are on average, simply because you lack sufficient statistics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @12:30PM
This. I have four people other than myself I socialize with and two are my parents and one is my wife. I still don't count my kids.
All my knowledge about extroversion comes from movies about American tweenagers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @08:49PM
That's no different than extroverts, they have few close friends and many acquaintances. A girl I knew once described her extrovert boyfriend (everyone 'knew' him / life and soul of the party) thus: "he has no friends".
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:53PM
Not true. This is a thing that is studied, and us shut ins can read available material.
70% of people fall somewhere on the extroverted half of the most commonly used psychological test(big five personality indicator). That means more likely to agree than disagree with statements like "I am energized by crowds."
I'm going to wager that this site's membership inverts that trend.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 08 2015, @12:44AM
I have multiple personalities, you insensitive clod, more than enough for a statistic.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by quadrox on Tuesday April 07 2015, @12:59PM
Sorry for meta/OT, but please please please for the love of god fix the spelling of extr_O_verted in the summary.
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:23PM
Which spelling is the right one? Typing extrOversion into wiki redirects me to extrAversion... In other words, what spelling are you complaining about? Was it wrong in the headline and it is now fixed OR the other way round.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:53PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:57PM
No, typing extrOversion into wiki just adds that word to the page. Oh, you didn't mean the edit box? ;-)
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:23PM
Don't spoil my tricks to be proven correct at the end of the day :)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 08 2015, @12:49AM
Definitely extraversion is the right one.
It's like "pizza with extra cheese", except in this case the word will indicate a request for some "supplementary version" to be added.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:12PM
We try to maintain the quoted portions of the source exactly 'as is' - and in this instance they chose the extraversion spelling which, at least according to some dictionaries and wikipedia, is an acceptable alternative spelling. However, neither of my spell checks (en.US and en.GB) accept extraversion.
Nevertheless, changing the spelling in the title alone does not seem to be justified as it understandable with either spelling. It doesn't look right to me either, but I don't think that it detracts too much from the story content.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by No Respect on Tuesday April 07 2015, @07:20PM
It does detract from the story when a 4th Grade spelling mistake is embedded in it. Would you correct a story that used "loose" instead of "lose"? There's a reason your spellcheckers don't accept it. It doesn't look right because it is, in fact, not right. I've never seen it spelled with an 'a'. As in never. If someone translated the original from German then fixing it would be a repair action.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday April 07 2015, @07:44PM
this article [preludecharacteranalysis.com] and do a nice job discussing this [personalitycafe.com]. Basically, it sounds like extravert is the correct technical usage, while extrovert is fairly commonly used..
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:10PM
I have no friend and there is no such paradox.
(Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:23PM
And I have only one doc, so there is no paradox.
(Score: 4, Funny) by tibman on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:56PM
Ah, in that case disregard the statement: "..our research suggests that you're probably more normal than you think."
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 07 2015, @04:47PM
I'm not surprised! I tried to add you as a friend, but I couldn't find your uid.
I tried to open your User Info page [soylentnews.org], but doing that logs me out of the website. Spooky!
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:36PM
Most people do best with some time with others, and some time alone. The idea that there was some sort of difference was created more-or-less whole cloth by Carl Jung: Sure, some people do better with more alone time, and some do better with more social time, but in general too much of either is unhealthy.
The difference is usually defined by which behavior energizes a person, but that can very much depend on who the person is being social with. People thought to be introverted are often energized by a deep and meaningful conversation with a dear friend or spouse or relative. People thought to be extroverted are often drained by pointless chit-chat with idiots.
About the only point of the distinction is to attempt to train people to not be offended if somebody wants some alone time, or somebody wants to socialize. But slapping a label on that doesn't really help anybody.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:18PM
but in general too much of either is unhealthy.
With "too much" and "unhealthy" being subjective. Just like being a homosexual was a 'mental illness' a few decades ago, this is subject to the whims of people with opinions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday April 07 2015, @04:12PM
About the only point of the distinction is to attempt to train people to not be offended if somebody wants some alone time, or ... to socialize
Eh? So if someone pesters you to join a crowd, you say "Sorry, but I'm an introvert" ? I think that if you tried it you would find it does not work.
There does not need to be a "point" to the distinction. It is an observation, a general classification. There are shades of course, but generally it is applied more as an aid to descibing the more extreme cases; like "Oprah Winfrey is an extrovert" and "Isaac Newton was an introvert", the sort of thing you would say if you needed to sum them up.
Maybe someday someone will discover (perhaps they have already) that extroverts have some different brain cells from introverts. That is how science starts. Like Darwin drew perhaps "pointless" distinctions between different finches in the Galapagos Islands, but it led him to the Theory of Evolution.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:31AM
The general idea is that the brain "wants" a certain level of activity. Too little or too much is uncomfortable and motivation leading to homeostasis kicks in. For extroverts, their default brain activity is less and thus have motivation to seek out stimulating things. For introverts, they have enough or too much default brain activity thus having added external stimulation is uncomfortable.