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arXiv:1605.04470 (physics)
[Submitted on 14 May 2016 (v1), last revised 18 Nov 2017 (this version, v6)]

Title:The Friendship Paradox and Systematic Biases in Perceptions and Social Norms

Authors:Matthew O. Jackson
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Abstract:The "friendship paradox" (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve complementarities. People with more friends experience greater interactive effects and hence engage more in socially influenced activities. Given the friendship paradox, people then perceive more engagement when sampling their friends than exists in the overall population. Given the complementarities, this feeds back to amplify average engagement. In addition, people with the greatest innate benefits from a behavior also tend to be the ones who choose to interact the most, leading to further feedback and amplification. These results are consistent with studies finding that people consistently overestimate peer consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs; and, can help explain problems with adolescent abuse of drugs and binge-drinking, as well as other behaviors. I also discuss how these results change in cases of strategic substitutes, where individuals overestimate free-riding by peers.
Comments: 28 pages, 10 figures
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Cite as: arXiv:1605.04470 [physics.soc-ph]
  (or arXiv:1605.04470v6 [physics.soc-ph] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1605.04470

Submission history

From: Matthew Jackson [view email]
[v1] Sat, 14 May 2016 21:37:46 UTC (772 KB)
[v2] Sat, 20 Aug 2016 16:14:59 UTC (766 KB)
[v3] Mon, 8 May 2017 04:56:04 UTC (788 KB)
[v4] Sat, 12 Aug 2017 03:38:24 UTC (804 KB)
[v5] Mon, 9 Oct 2017 05:48:18 UTC (834 KB)
[v6] Sat, 18 Nov 2017 04:20:42 UTC (832 KB)
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