All The People You Don't Know

13:41Michael Stevens:There's a different kind of stranger besides the familiar stranger that's a little bit closer. And this type of relationship was first described by Karen L. Fingerman. Great name, by the way. Great name. We've got a few great names today. So she described what she called the consequential stranger. The consequential stranger is someone that you don't mutually ignore, but you're not intimate. One of the key defining differences between your intimate friends and the consequential stranger is that there's basically no obligation. Okay, this might be someone like the person at the hardware store or the grocery store.

14:22Michael Stevens:You might know their name. You tell them about your day when you check out. They work there. But, like, you would never invite them to your birthday party. You're not going for a beer with them. That's right. You would never give them a ride to the airport. And there's no expectation that that kind of obligation would ever come up in your relationship. So sometimes we call them acquaintances. But there are obviously different degrees of acquaintanceship. One kind that psychologists talk about a lot is the nodding relationship, which is a very fringe one where you'll just kind of nod at each other.

14:55Michael Stevens:You know, often it's a co-worker that's in a completely different department or they share a building but work for a different company. And you recognize them and you got to do something. So you nod, but you don't even talk.

15:06Hannah Fry:The country road version of that is the one finger wave. Hands still on the steering wheel. One finger wave.

15:12Michael Stevens:One finger wave. They do that out here where I am. by the way. It's like a whole thing. And my wife does most of the driving out here because I'm not used to driving on the right hand side of the car. But she always like talks about, oh, man, I need to get better at doing the wave because she always misses it because she's just not used to doing it. Where am I? By the way, you might be wondering, I am off the grid in in New Zealand visiting. I've told Hannah all about this. I don't want to dox myself. But basically, I married a woman who has a lot of family in a certain location. And I am there right now.

15:44Michael Stevens:That sounds so mysterious. I don't mean it to sound mysterious. No, it's great.

15:48Hannah Fry:You got your wife outside turning a hand crank just to give you power? No, I don't.

15:54Michael Stevens:I don't. The electrical power all comes from the sun. We've got solar panels on the roof. And so I'm nervous. It was sunny yesterday, but it's cloudy today. So I might be using up all the power just to do this.

16:07Hannah Fry:It was worth it.

16:09Michael Stevens:But yeah, that's what the fire is for. The fire gives you the light you need. It also gives you warmth. It's your clothes dryer. It's how you cook.

16:15Hannah Fry:And it makes sense that you are currently in winter.

16:18Michael Stevens:Yes, I am currently in winter, whereas you are currently in summer.

16:21Hannah Fry:Yeah, I would swap, frankly. This is disgustingly hot here.

16:26Michael Stevens:I do not envy you. I am so glad. I love escaping the Northern Hemisphere summer for this winter. Fingerman also fingered a different kind of relationship. Becoming a very finger-themed section. She's the one who coined the term fringeship.

16:45Hannah Fry:Okay.

16:46Michael Stevens:Not a friendship, but a fringeship.

16:49Hannah Fry:So is this like somewhere between your intimate friends and your, what did you call them? Consequential strangers?

16:56Michael Stevens:Yeah. Consequential strangers are called consequential because as it turns out, After decades of study, it's really been established that the majority of what events change our lives come from these strangers. Obviously, my close family affects my life really directly. But when it comes to things like job opportunities, when it comes to things like finding flats to rent, finding a dog or a cat to adopt, It's not usually my mother who happens to know that there's an opening at some company. It's my neighbor's brother who had just visited last weekend, right? It's, oh, my daughter's teacher has a cold college friend who's got a bunch of kittens.

17:46Hannah Fry:Is that by virtue of just the fact that there's so many more of them? Exactly. I mean, if you're thinking of like an onion here, right? Like you're in the center, your immediate friends and family are surrounding you. And as you go sort of further out through friendship, consequential strangers, familiar strangers, and out to complete strangers, it's like the number just gets progressively larger and larger and larger.

18:06Michael Stevens:Yeah, the number gets larger. And so the diversity increases. And it also makes sense that, you know, we would self-select intimate friends that are more similar to us. But when it comes to a life changing opportunity, it's going to come from outside of our routine, which means it's going to come from someone we haven't self-selected to have as a really close friend. The decision that you made to really change your life came from a consequential stranger. And as social media grows, there's yet another kind that was named by Hidinori Tomita, the intimate stranger. This is a person that we have anonymous contact with, usually through the Internet, that we yet share quite intimate details with.

18:52Michael Stevens:And this is just a word. I don't think there's been a whole lot of research into differentiating the intimate stranger from the consequential stranger, except for the fact that the intimate stranger needs to be an anonymous. We don't even share names. You might only know their avatar or their username. But we do know that people often feel very comfortable sharing intimate details with strangers.

19:20Hannah Fry:There's a sort of safety to it almost because you don't feel as though, I don't know, like the stuff that you tell them is going to come back to bite you if they're unconnected from your life. I think there's something that's a little bit freeing potentially about that.

19:38Michael Stevens:That's right. It's freeing. It's also freeing to know that because they don't know the people involved and they haven't heard it before, you can kind of tell it fresh and you can understand yourself better by talking. It's like a therapist, except they don't even have a history. You know, it's like your first day with a therapist. You're like, OK, I can kind of like look at myself from outside because you're so outside. And there's a there's a bit of a hump. It's been discovered when it comes to how how easily we will share intimate details with with strangers. They call this the stranger on the train phenomenon, by the way, the fact that people are so open with those they really don't know.

20:18Michael Stevens:But that hump is that we have this civic inattention, this like we're not going to talk hump to get over. And so when researchers investigate how intimate strangers will be with them, it sounded kind of weird. But what I mean is sharing personal information. Emotionally intimate. Yeah. Emotionally intimate. Yeah. They find that it's really hard to get it started. It's really hard to get a stranger to share a cab with you, even if you agree to pay the whole fare. But once you get them in, they'll start telling you about their divorce. They'll start telling you about how maybe they're never going to find love.

20:53Michael Stevens:And it's it makes them feel better. But they just needed to get in the cab in the first place. And you needed to invite them in and convince them to get in in the first place. And then all this growth can occur.

21:03Hannah Fry:There's a really beautiful YouTube channel that I really like, which is where they have a phone, like an old fashioned sort of corded phone set up on a bridge. And the camera starts out with a person's face just framed. They're holding the phone and that's kind of all you see. and they're telling a story that's incredibly emotionally intimate, incredibly personal about some trauma that they lived through or the thing that they dislike the most about themselves. It's really, really revealing stuff. And as they're talking, the camera slowly pans away and you realize that it's this incredibly long lens shot that the actual camera, nobody's really listening.

21:48Hannah Fry:This person is essentially talking out to the open water we feel freer to reveal the most the innermost secrets that we have um when we don't necessarily feel that we're like divulging it to someone where there'll be consequences okay you got to

22:07Michael Stevens:share that link with me because i'm trying to remember there was also like a blog that would publish letters you could write anonymously, where you could apologize for something or admit something or discuss a regret that you would never say to anyone involved, but you needed to say to strangers. It wasn't post-secret. It was something else. I'm sure the commenters will know.

22:33Hannah Fry:This is called A View from a Bridge. Let me send it to you. It's absolutely beautiful.

22:37Michael Stevens:Ooh. Thank you.

22:40Hannah Fry:I have one more question actually about that idea of intimate strangers. That has to be reciprocal, right? It's not, this is a relationship between two people. It's not just someone divulging stuff about them into the ether. This intimate stranger friendship in inverted commas means the details are being shared both ways.

23:01Michael Stevens:I don't think it has to be actually. I think that sometimes you just need someone to listen and one can just be the anonymous listener. and the other can be the divulger.

23:12Hannah Fry:I'm thinking about some very overshary influencers here, basically.

23:16Michael Stevens:Ah, interesting. Well, yeah, so influencers, I think, can bring us into what I want to talk about next, which is the directionality of friendships and how it's not always as even as we think or would like.

23:30Hannah Fry:Okay, well, that sounds like a perfect point for us to have a little break. And yeah, when we come back, we'll find out why you're not as popular as you think you are.

23:48Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. What if your immune system could learn to recognize cancer cells?

23:56Michael Stevens:That's immunotherapy. One type is CAR T-cell therapy. T-cells are your body's watchman, and doctors can now extract these and reprogram them to spot cancer.

24:06Hannah Fry:They've started showing this real promise in treating cancers of the blood like leukemia, because unlike most cancers, blood cancer cells, they float around separately, and that makes it easier for CAR T cells to seek them out and destroy them.

24:19Michael Stevens:And now Cancer Research UK funded scientists are designing CAR T cells that can tackle solid tumors too, making them tougher so they can survive a more crowded and hostile cancer environment.

24:30Hannah Fry:Now these approaches are experimental, but they do start to show where treatment might go next. And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. I mean, this shows you how far research can take us.

24:44Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash rest is science.

24:55Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach, built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights, and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google account, Google Health app, internet, and Google Health premium subscription. Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy.

25:26Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling, just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

25:56Michael Stevens:Okay, welcome back, everybody. So we've been talking about strangers and the different kinds and the different sort of surprising relationships we can have to people we don't even know. And the fact that researchers are looking into this and have names for them. And, you know, what I said that we would come back to is the big so what? Hannah, you mentioned the guy who would always order a pizza regularly. And then when he stopped, they checked on him. Well, as it turns out, that kind of thing, beyond just job opportunities and life opportunities, are some of the most necessary things we get from strangers.

26:35Michael Stevens:In fact, studies have been done ever since the 70s when Mark Granovetter first coined the term weak ties to refer to people that were weakly tied to. And they found that the more different types of relationships you have, the healthier you are. There's a correlation between your your physical health and your longevity as well and the diversity of types of relationships you have. So it's not just important to have some really close friends. It's also important to have consequential strangers, familiar strangers, even intimate strangers in your life.

27:22Hannah Fry:I have some questions about the methodology of that particular study. I want to know how you're measuring health. I want to know how you are, like, over how long are they tracking people? I've got questions.

27:34Michael Stevens:Tell me more about your question. Are you suspicious of that result?

27:41Hannah Fry:I would say curious rather than suspicious. But mostly because it feels like it would be really hard to measure concretely.

27:47Michael Stevens:Everything I'm sharing today, I researched years up to months ago for a Bsauce episode. I'm giving everyone a little introductory taste. I even remember writing this into a script draft, that they took people and injected them with the common cold. And then they saw if the outcome would correlate with the variety of social ties that they had. Not the variety of the people themselves, but the variety of types of relationships, consequential, familiar, intimate, those kinds of things. So yeah, you've got it right in front of you. Tell me. No, right.

28:24Hannah Fry:So exactly as you're describing, and you would think it wouldn't make a difference, right? It's like, so you take everybody, you map their social networks, you put them into quarantine, and then just before they leave quarantine, you squirt some common cold up their noses, right? And it's like, why would it make a difference? They've got it squirted up their noses. Surely they've all got the cold. But in this paper, people who had low social network diversity, so essentially only one to three types of social ties, were four times as likely to to develop a full-blown cold compared to people who had highly diverse networks of like six or more types.

29:00Hannah Fry:So people who are essentially out there in the world, running around the entire time, talking to people, mixing with people, were physically less likely to end up getting sick, despite having the same exposure as people who just sort of sat around at home. Yeah. Which is wild.

29:19Michael Stevens:It doesn't mean that you have a better outcome if you love your mother more. It means you have a better outcome if you have more different types of relationships. If you're out there in the world.

29:33Hannah Fry:That's right.

29:33Michael Stevens:The Sociology and Anthropology Department at Illinois State University has been looking into this, especially Susan Sprecher. And she's found that having a more diverse social network that includes intimate others and family, close friends, casual friends and weak ties, acquaintances and other peripheral ties is associated with good health and well-being. Indeed, this article says weak ties can give us a real mental health boost. A 2014 study indicated that people with wider connections of weak ties tend to be happier. So not just a variety of different strength of ties, but also the diversity and size of those ties.

30:12Michael Stevens:First of all, I get how it would make you feel more connected to the world. In fact, one famous way of describing consequential strangers versus intimates is to say that intimates anchor us at home. consequential strangers anchor us in the world. So the person at the hardware store who always checks you out, checks, checks you out, like, Ooh, you're looking good. I think that would also be a very consequential stranger. I mean, that would be true. The people you fancy on the bus. Yeah. Those people that we have very few obligations to and yet recognize and interact with anchor us in the larger world and make us feel like we belong, that we would be missed.

30:54Michael Stevens:Obviously, my mother, my wife, and my daughter make me feel like I would be missed. But there's an almost unconscious way in which the people we see every day, the coworker whose name we don't really know but we have a nodding relationship with, all of those contribute to our emotional and potentially even our physical well-being. Now, I can see like one strong explanation for the correlation could be that if someone has a large variety of types of social relationships, then they probably are also interacting with more people, which means their immune system is getting exposure to a lot more pathogens.

31:36Whereas someone who has a close-knit group of just intimate friends but doesn't really get out, they're not exposed to as many pathogens for their immune system to then recognize and be prepared for.

31:48Hannah Fry:This is another paper that came out later in 2019, which essentially says, right, we're the social, we're the cognitive social species, right? We are happiest when we are out among others when we're socializing. And the idea is that our immune system treats social isolation as like an active physical threat. And so ramps up inflammatory responses and then suppresses antiviral immunity. So basically, we don't like being on our own, and your body is physically happier and more capable of handling actual threats when you're out in the world around people. Exactly. I need to leave my home office immediately, Michael.

32:30Hannah Fry:This is freaking me out.

32:33Michael Stevens:Maybe, maybe. I want to emphasize that what it means to be lonely is subjective. And it's important that you don't feel lonely. It doesn't mean that you have to be extra... an extrovert who's out among people all the time. For different people, what it means to have a lot of relationships can change. But I do know that when it comes to cognitive health late in life, so things like the onset of dementia, we know that one of the best predictors of a quick decline is whether the person says they feel lonely. Now, there are people who do really well and by all accounts externally are lonely like they rarely see other people and yet as long as they don't say they feel lonely like they feel fine the amount of social interaction they're getting is fine for them they have a better outcome but as soon as you feel that it's not meeting what your needs are socially that's when there can be trouble got you got you there's

33:41Hannah Fry:gap that you're yearning for.

33:42Michael Stevens:So if you're someone out there who loves bed rotting and you just stare at your phone all day and never leave, that's probably not good, okay, to be fair. However, if it doesn't bother you that much, it's better than if it does bother you a lot, is what I'm saying.

34:01Hannah Fry:But all the same, please enjoy this YouTube presentation.

34:06Michael Stevens:That's right. And we will keep pumping out a couple hours of this a week for your lonely pleasure. Look, all we're saying is, look, I doom scroll as much as anybody else.

34:18Hannah Fry:But if you're going to doom scroll, you may as well doom scroll on stuff that's actually enriching your brain, which is what this is.

34:24Michael Stevens:And that's a great transition into the next kind of relationship I want to look at, which is a unilateral one. These exist and have existed for all of human history. Unilateral old means the friendship, the relationship goes one way.

34:39Hannah Fry:Oh, yeah.

34:40Michael Stevens:Hannah's my friend. But then if you ask Hannah, she goes, I don't really know him. Okay. That is that is in contrast to a reciprocal friendship where both people independently say that the other is a friend and and consider each other friends to the same degree. Obviously, this can get us into discussions of influencers, where a lot of people who follow the influencer might have a parasocial relationship with that influencer, where they feel like the influencer is their friend, is closer to them than in reality they are. And certainly it feels closer than the influencer themselves feel to that person.

35:20Michael Stevens:They probably don't even know that person. So this brings us to the 2015 study out of MIT that looked at a number of different data sets, a number of different data sets involving social networks where groups of college students or coworkers or community members were asked. Here's a list of everyone that's around you. I want you to rate them on a scale of zero to five, with zero being I've never heard of that person, five being they are a one of my closest friends. Where would you rank them? And this kind of study had been done, you know, for decades to look at how social networks build in real life and what it means to be popular, how influence spreads.

36:05Michael Stevens:But what hadn't really been looked at was the unilateralness. How often is it that a person says, oh, yeah, Sarah is my friend, but Sarah doesn't think that person is her friend. And as it turns out, it's really, really common. So I'll tell you what they found. They found that in the friends and family data set, which you'll have to look up what all these data sets are when they were made and how many people they involved. OK, they found that in the friends and family data set, only 45 percent of reported friendships were reciprocal. So less than half the time did two people agree independently that they were friends in the reality mining data set.

36:46Michael Stevens:Only 34 percent were reciprocal in the social evolution data set. Thirty five percent in Europe. Those are all from America, by the way, the ones I just said. This one, the strongest ties data set from Europe, 49 percent were reciprocal. And then the personality survey, which is a Middle Eastern survey, only found that 53 % of described friendships were reciprocal. And this was really shocking. And it's been it's been found since that, yes, indeed, people are really bad at either evaluating the reciprocity of a friendship or they're just bad at reporting it. One of the most common reasons is that non-reciprocal friendships, the researchers have found, are generally aspirational, meaning a person wants to be friends with a higher status individual.

37:37Hannah Fry:Yeah.

37:38Michael Stevens:But those higher status individuals, where status can mean anything from wealth to popularity to perceived coolness, those people have greater choice. They've got their own focus elsewhere. Yeah.

37:51Hannah Fry:Can I just ask you, just remind me, wait, how do they do it? So it's a score between zero and five, and you have a full list of names, and you put a number against everybody, or are you limited in the number of people you can score?

38:01Michael Stevens:You're limited to scoring people that are on the provided list, and everyone on the list is asked about everyone on the list.

38:07Hannah Fry:Right. Oh, wow, that's rough.

38:09Michael Stevens:Zero to five is only true of the friends and family data set. I haven't looked at the others, but I know that the personality survey was zero to seven.

38:16Hannah Fry:But it's not like someone saying, okay, give me your top 10 friends, and then popular people just sort of run out of places to put friends down.

38:27Michael Stevens:No, no, I see what you're asking. No, it really was you have to score everybody on this list. How close are they to you? Would you consider them a three, which is just like a friend, or a really good friend, or one of your best? Or are they an acquaintance, or do you not know them at all?

38:43Hannah Fry:Oh, that's so brutal.

38:45Michael Stevens:So here's the thing. When you look at the graphs, we can put the paper below. I can share it with you, too, Hannah. When you look at the graphs they built where a node is a person and a line is a connection, you'll also see that there are essentially clicks where a lot of people all consider each other mutual friends. But the connections between those clicks are usually made of unilateral connections where someone in one click says a person in another click is their friend, but it doesn't go the other way. Wow. So here's the paper coming at you.

39:17Hannah Fry:I have to say, as somebody who was... I really struggled at school. I really, really struggled at school with friendships. I was so nerdy. I definitely would have been one of the people who... who had only unilateral friendships, who was sort of like, oh, I think this person's my friend, this person's my friend. And then they would never have written me down. Like I was the kid who was eating lunch in the bathroom.

39:44Michael Stevens:You know what I mean? Oh, Hannah. I'm so sorry. Was it because of your red hair?

39:48Hannah Fry:I think it was a whole manner of things, Michael. A whole manner of things. But look how much you've grown now. But look. Look at that. Now people claim to know me on Reddit.

39:57Michael Stevens:Oh, that's true. Yeah. So the researchers in this paper, they didn't just look at reciprocity and how frequent it is in friendships. They also looked at the way influence happens. And they found quite surprisingly, because a lot of these data sets have been followed over time and different experiments have been done on the same subject pool. And sometimes what's done is studies that use things like the buddy system to see how people can help each other. They found that when it comes to influencing someone else's behavior, like getting someone to become more physically active. Mutual friends do a really good job of lifting each other up.

40:43Michael Stevens:A mutual friend is when both people independently say that the other is their friend. But surprisingly, they found that if someone else calls me their friend, that also, but I don't call them a friend, that also influences me. Their behavior is correlated with a change in my behavior.

41:03Hannah Fry:That's interesting.

41:04Michael Stevens:Just as though we were mutual friends.

41:06Hannah Fry:If someone admires you and you spend time around them physically, so it's not like a kind of, you're not strangers.

41:13Michael Stevens:That's right. But I don't admire them. I don't consider them close.

41:18Hannah Fry:Yeah. They nonetheless influence me a statistically significant amount.

41:23Michael Stevens:And yet, if the inverse relationship happens where I consider someone a friend, But unbeknownst to me, they don't really think about me very much. In that case, they don't influence me actually as off as much as you would think.

41:38Hannah Fry:Right. That feels like almost the wrong way around.

41:40Michael Stevens:It sounds the wrong way around because we call that third kind of relationship an influencer relationship. I'm the follower. The followee should be influencing me. But they just have not found that to be the case, at least in real life. On social media, it could be different. But I think that this does raise a question that we need more research on, which is to what extent are the influencers actually be influenced? Because I can I can tell you that, you know, you and I here on this podcast, we're influencers. Right. But yet the amount of time we spend as a team discussing comments and how we should title things and what topics we should choose is gargantuan.

42:24Hannah Fry:okay maybe we are the influenced we are the influenced by you our listeners and viewers

42:30Michael Stevens:what you like changes what we do exactly and all of the subscribers all of the followers all the listeners out there they're the true influencers and they have an extremely powerful weapon that's that amplifies their influence it's called the algorithm the algorithm tells us hey this is what they want to watch. You can't just do whatever you want and they'll watch it. This isn't the 1990s with, you know, cable television and whatever's on is on work. They're going to choose and we're going to let them choose. And then we're going to learn what they like to choose and give them more of it. And so we, the influencers are much more influenced by the audience than possibly even the other way around.

43:12Michael Stevens:That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Obviously, there are clearly, especially young people who follow influencers and really idolize those people and change their behavior. And yet the influencer doesn't even know they exist. But by and large, across the human population, we just aren't seeing that influencers actually have the behavior changing effect that we think they do.

43:34Hannah Fry:That's amazing. I have an example of an exception. It's one of my favorite ever stories. Okay, tell me. Which is about a tile making company in Hungary, and it was having to downsize. But But the real problem was that there were all of these incredibly vicious rumors that were flying around the entire company. So it just so happened that they knew this very famous Hungarian network scientist called Barabashi. And so he suggested conducting this mapping, right? Going, let's map this network of influence. Essentially, I mean, there was this whole questionnaire, but essentially the key question was, give me the name of one person you would go to for advice or information.

44:13Hannah Fry:So they asked every single person in the company this, and then they mapped the network that resulted. and almost everybody had almost no one. But far and away, the most influential person in this entire company was this entry-level employee. It turns out this was the safety officer for the company. So what he was doing was going around to all of these different offices and apparently just bringing all the gossip with him as he went. So then they recognized how powerful it was to have somebody like that. So they just sort of gave him a pay rise and then used him to kind of feed out all the secrets that they wanted throughout the company.

44:43Michael Stevens:Oh yeah. I mean, social influence definitely exists, but the extent to which friendship is part of it and and whether that friendship is is reciprocal is still very much up for debate. I think this safety officer had a lot of arrows pointing to him, but he may have also known all of those people and also counted them as friends. True. Very true. I think that these ideas are all, in my mind, still being formed and research is still being done on it. But I think that obviously influencers can, you know, let us know about things. But whether we take an action on them, I think when you think about it, it often also depends on what the community is saying and how they're responding.

45:31Michael Stevens:It's not just the influencers video alone. It's also the comments. And those comments are coming from people that I am sort of forming a trust relationship with momentarily, and they don't even know I'm doing it. So it's unilateral. I'm kind of counting them as a friend temporarily, and yet they don't even know I'm doing this. They don't know who I am. It's those comments and the reaction the community has that lets me know if this influencer is going to push or pull me or if I'm just going to make fun of them as well. The last thing I want to talk about is the scientific fact that your friends have more friends than you do.

46:11Hannah Fry:Think for yourself, Michael.

46:12Michael Stevens:Look, look, there obviously there are exceptions, but as a general rule, it's known as the friendship paradox and it mathematically must be true. So long as people have friends and they don't all have the same number of friends, this will always be true. The reason it's true is that people who have a lot of friends, people who are really popular, wind up getting overcounted. They're sampled a lot more when you ask any random person, who are you who are you friends with? So if I'm friends with only two people and one of them is kind of like a special friendship and this person only has one other friend and it's me.

46:49Michael Stevens:OK, there's that. But then I might have my second friend and it's Jim, a guy with ninety nine friends. Of course, I'm friends with Jim. He's got ninety nine friends. We're all friends with Jim. Well, now when you look at it, I've got two friends, but my friends on average have 50 friends because those really popular socially central people throw it all off. And this can lead to a lot of illusory perceptions we have of our own popularity, because as a rule, unless you are one of the most popular people or the most popular person, on average, your friends will have more friends than you do.

47:27Hannah Fry:It holds true. You get the same phenomenon on social media. It's like, the people you follow have more followers than you. Exactly. And the reality is, it's because you follow, you know, Mr. Beast. I'm just making assumptions about who you're following, Michael, but who has a hundred million followers or whatever it might be. And therefore, I mean, exactly the same example that you laid out, but just sort of scaled up to the size of the population. Yeah.

47:55Michael Stevens:And so I think it's a good thing to keep in mind if you ever feel like you're trying to keep up with the Joneses. You feel like, how come how come it feels like everyone else has more friends than I do? They do. But it's mathematically the case that everyone feels that way. But that's a topological fact. There are other things associated with being popular and with having a lot of friends that also can be described by the friendship paradox. For example, your friends also tend to be wealthier than you because wealthier people, they tend to statistically have more friends, have more interactions with more people.

48:34Michael Stevens:Therefore, the same effect happens for the same reason. There are people with a lot of money and a lot of friends who throw off those averages and make it the case that your friends, on average, have more money than you, that they are healthier than you because healthy people are out and about. They're forming connections. They have a lot of friendships. The question I have that's still open, I haven't found research that's recent on this, but this also leads to why young people overestimate the number of risky behaviors their peers participate in. because there are certain things like going to parties, drinking, smoking, that are more prevalent with people who have more friends.

49:17Michael Stevens:Therefore, when you look at your friend group, you go, wow, the people that I know and the people that I know of definitely drink more than I do. And everyone feels that way. And it's not just we don't have to just look at the psychology behind it of, oh, well, everyone overestimates how much their peers drink because it makes them feel better. We can just look at statistically at how it's going to happen that when you go to parties, you see people who go to more parties. And so that becomes the sample that you're looking at. But this has become something that researchers have noticed for real.

49:51Michael Stevens:It's not just a well, in my armchair. I think this makes sense. These studies are all a bit older. And I think that in in recent years, we've seen that young people especially are drinking less. They're being violent less, they're having premarital sex less. But in 2005, it was found amongst middle school students that each additional friendship accounted for a 5 % increase in the probability that the students smoked. And a 2013 study found that being named as a friend by five additional others accounted for a 30 % increase in the likelihood that that middle schooler had tried alcohol.

50:28Hannah Fry:Here's the thing, Michael, I can hear you're reading this and you're saying, no, look, the friendship paradox demonstrates that you have an incorrect perception or a warped perception of how important these individuals are across the entire population. Sure, I appreciate that's what you're saying. But all I'm hearing is you get more friends if you go to parties and you get more friends if you drink and smoke. And maybe that was the mistake that I've been making since 2003. Maybe I should be at parties more.

50:58Michael Stevens:Exactly. If you'd gone to more parties, then you would have probably partaken in more of these activities. I'd have actual friends.

51:07Hannah Fry:Redditor, hit me up, okay?

51:10Michael Stevens:And so anyway, this kind of explains why especially young people tend to overestimate the behaviors of their peers when it comes to things like drinking and smoking. But I'm wondering if it's different today. I think there might be other traits that correlate with popularity today. For example, maybe your ability to communicate and be effective on social media. It might lead to a feeling of, well, everyone else is so much better at social media than me. And that's because the ones that you see are the ones who are good at it. And they wind up having more connections. And you are more likely to know of them and be a friend or follower of theirs.

51:52Hannah Fry:I also wonder about gyms being the new party places, you know.

51:56Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah.

51:56Hannah Fry:Gym bunnies have a lot of friends there. They meet them in the gym.

52:00Michael Stevens:Yeah, exactly. And so I'm quoting studies that are more than, you know, 10, 20 years old.

52:06Hannah Fry:Yeah.

52:06Michael Stevens:And I wasn't able to find much about how teens especially evaluate the frequency of certain behaviors of their peers. So I don't know how this works today. But I do think that the math will still hold that whatever other traits coincide with popularity will also be overestimated by the rest of the population as being prevalent.

52:31Hannah Fry:One of the things about the friendship paradox that I've always thought is that it's sort of an artifact of the idea that like means, you know, averages using a mean is not a useful way to think about stuff, right? That's sort of one of the things I think about it. There's network effects. There's all of that. Sure. But one of the key things is that you're taking a distribution of individuals, some with very large numbers that are overrepresented. Sure. But then when you take the average, it's just the whole, it skews the average. And the thing I like to think about is that you have an above average number of arms, Michael.

53:09Hannah Fry:So do I. In fact, limbs in general, right? Or like the average person has slightly less than one boob, you know? It's like, actually, when you use means, sometimes they don't make any sense. You could apply this this way, which is that your friends have less arms than you, on average.

53:32Michael Stevens:Because you probably statistically have two arms. And yet, if we fan out to all the people you know, there will be people who have fewer than two arms and they'll drag that average down. So your friends have fewer arms than you do, statistically.

53:50Hannah Fry:On average, yeah.

53:51Michael Stevens:On average. And by the way, that also brings up the enemy paradox, which is the same thing, which is that your enemies have more enemies than you do.

54:02Hannah Fry:That one feels better.

54:03Michael Stevens:Yeah, exactly. So it just depends on what data you want to meditate on, how well you feel.

54:09Hannah Fry:That also sort of makes more intuitive sense, I think, because of course, my enemies are absolute arseholes and everyone hates them, not just me.

54:17Michael Stevens:Yeah, see, exactly. Exactly. It's just math. So keep this in mind. When you compare yourself to other people, you're comparing yourself to a group that isn't an arbitrary sample of the population. It is weighted towards those that you will be aware of. It's weighted full of people who are more connected and popular than the average person. Therefore, it's not a fair comparison. I don't know, that actually doesn't make me feel that much better. It just makes me remember that there are people who are doing much better at forming friendships and being popular than me.

54:50Hannah Fry:Look, it would have been little comfort to me in the bathroom stall of Pressdale School in about 1998, you know, as I tried to eat my lunch. That's right. It doesn't really work.

55:03Michael Stevens:You know, Mom, I'm feeling bad about myself. Well, just remember that a few people are amazing and they're so much better than you, that they throw off the average. But in general, a typical person chosen at random could be worse than you. Do you feel better now, Michael?

55:21Hannah Fry:Look, our job here is not to make anyone feel better. It's to expand your minds, tickle and tease you with the absolute best of what science and psychology and mathematics and philosophy have to offer. And I feel like we've done that. Exactly.

55:34Michael Stevens:What we have to offer is reality and humility. And I am really glad to hand that out. I think the most magical thought that has happened in my mind during all of this is just that reflection on the fact that I am someone else's familiar stranger. I'm part of someone's life. And I don't know it. And everyone is. And we all are. All of you out there listening are a part of our lives. And you might actually be the true influencer here. So thank you for being who you are.

56:08Hannah Fry:This is very true. you can continue to influence us by emailing therestedscience at goalhanger.com or by leaving a comment here, wherever you're getting this podcast.

56:18Michael Stevens:Exactly. See, look at that. They can email us, but I can't email them.

56:22Hannah Fry:No, no. This is not a reciprocal relationship in the wrong direction. How the tables have turned, Hannah. How they have turned.

56:32Michael Stevens:We appreciate you guys. Have a good day and we'll see you later.

56:35Hannah Fry:See you next time.

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