Title: Which friends are more popular than you? Contact strength and the friendship paradox in social networks,
Abstract: The friendship paradox states that in a social network, egos tend to have
lower degree than their alters, or, "your friends have more friends than you
do". Most research has focused on the friendship paradox and its implications
for information transmission, but treating the network as static and
unweighted. Yet, people can dedicate only a finite fraction of their attention
budget to each social interaction: a high-degree individual may have less time
to dedicate to individual social links, forcing them to modulate the quantities
of contact made to their different social ties. Here we study the friendship
paradox in the context of differing contact volumes between egos and alters,
finding a connection between contact volume and the strength of the friendship
paradox. The most frequently contacted alters exhibit a less pronounced
friendship paradox compared with the ego, whereas less-frequently contacted
alters are more likely to be high degree and give rise to the paradox. We argue
therefore for a more nuanced version of the friendship paradox: "your closest
friends have slightly more friends than you do", and in certain networks even:
"your best friend has no more friends than you do". We demonstrate that this
relationship is robust, holding in both a social media and a mobile phone
dataset. These results have implications for information transfer and influence
in social networks, which we explore using a simple dynamical model.