E-Mail The friendship paradox is the observation that the degrees of the neighbors of a node within any network will, on average, be greater than the degree of the node itself. In other words: your friends probably have more friends than you do. While the standard framing of the friendship paradox is essentially about averages, significant variations occur too. In the Journal of Complex Networks, Santa Fe Institute and University of Michigan researchers George Cantwell, Alec Kirkley, and Mark Newman address this by developing the mathematical theory of the friendship paradox. Some people have lots of friends, while others have only a few. Unless you have good reason to believe otherwise, it's reasonable to assume you have roughly an average number of friends.