With social media, it's easy to think that our outgoing, popular friends have more friends than we do, but researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College conducted a study showing that extraverts are overrepresented in "real-world networks," according to the Association for Psychological Science.
The results, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that extraverts actually feel the friendship paradox more intensely than others.
"If you're more extraverted, you may really have a skewed view of how extraverted other people are in general," Feiler said, according to the Association for Psychological Science. "If you're very introverted you might actually have a pretty accurate idea."
"The skew gets really extreme the more extraverted you are," Feiler said, according to the Association for Psychological Science.
"There's a fundamental assumption in psychology that inferences about social norms are based on the people we interact with, and if that's the case, then we need to consider when our social network is a biased sample and how that affects our social beliefs," Feiler said, according to the Association for Psychological Science.
"Earlier research examined how relationships and networks form, but ours is the first study we know of that links the fundamental processes of network formation to systematic biases in network structure," Kleinbaum added, according to the Association for Psychological Science.
"There's a human tendency to wonder, 'Am I normal?'" Feiler said, according to the Association for Psychological Science. "And our research suggests that you're probably more normal than you think."
