Do your friends really have more friends than you?
This isn't about being unpopular. It's a near-universal property of social networks, measured directly on the real Facebook graph at the scale of hundreds of millions of accounts.
Facebook's social graph, ~721 million active users (Ugander et al., 2011)
Only people with nearly 700 friends or more, a small minority of users, tended to have friends with smaller networks than their own, on average.
Why: a 300-person simulated network, built live in your browser
Computing…
In any network where some people have more friends than others, your friends will, on average, have more friends than you do. It's arithmetic, not bias: a person with 200 friends is counted in 200 friend lists, and a person with 3 friends only 3 times, so the well-connected few pull almost everyone's "my friends' average" above their own count.
The same weighting shows up anywhere you sample by "being there": most students sit in classes bigger than the college's average class size, because big classes hold more students to report them. Before trusting an average someone experienced, ask whether the busy, crowded, or well-connected cases got counted more than once.
Why do your friends seem busier and more popular than you?
Popular people count more times, once per friend they have
In any network where some people have more friends than others, your friends will, on average, have more friends than the typical person — no bias, no illusion, just arithmetic. The simulation above builds a network where each newcomer is a little more likely to connect to people who already have many friends, a simple rule often used to model social networks, airline routes, and citation networks. Nobody in it is trying to be popular, and yet most people end up with better-connected friends.
Now average, for each person, how many friends their friends have. A person with 200 friends gets counted in that average 200 times — once in every friend list they belong to. A person with 3 friends gets counted only 3 times. The well-connected minority dominates everyone else's average, which pulls almost everybody's "my friends' average" above their own friend count.
Explore how the same sampling trap shows up elsewhere
It's a cousin of our Simpson’s Paradox exhibit: in both, how a population gets combined or sampled — one friend at a time, or one admissions department at a time — can quietly shape the answer before a single number gets calculated.
Related exhibits
Sources: Johan Ugander, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom, Cameron Marlow, "The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph," arXiv:1111.4503 (2011), analyzing the full active Facebook user graph at the time (~721 million users). Phenomenon first described by Scott L. Feld, "Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do," American Journal of Sociology, 1991. The scatter plot above is generated live in your browser from a seeded random simulation (Barabási–Albert preferential-attachment network, 300 nodes) — not the real Facebook data, but the same structural mechanism.