Learn a new word: The Friendship Paradox

Do you sometimes get the feeling that somewhere there are amazingly cool things being done by seemingly very cool people that you are somewhat connected to and have awareness of due to your Facebook/Instagram addiction? 

I mean every time on the weekend when you scroll though your timeline, (in between loads of laundry and cleaning up dog poop), you are treated with images of people laughing at a party, strolling on a white sandy beach, or enjoying another #perfect #sunset with #wine?

Quick aside, and this is for everyone - ENOUGH with the sunset/sunrise pictures. The sun rises and sets EVERY day and everyone has seen this phenomenon thousands of times. We get it already.

Ok, back to the point.

Why is it that it seems like lots and lots of other folks are having an AMAZING time while you, well, not so much?

It could be due to something called The Friendship Paradox. The Friendship Paradox is the phenomenon that your friends have more friends than you do. How does that make sense?

Actually pretty simple, from a recent article on the topic called The Inspection Paradox is Everywhere, by Allen Downey:

In 1991, Scott Feld presented the “friendship paradox”: the observation that most people have fewer friends than their friends have.  He studied real-life friends, but the same effect appears in online networks: if you choose a random Facebook user, and then choose one of their friends at random, the chance is about 80% that the friend has more friends.

The friendship paradox is a form of the inspection paradox.  When you choose a random user, every user is equally likely.  But when you choose one of their friends, you are more likely to choose someone with a lot of friends.  Specifically, someone with x friends is overrepresented by a factor of x.

Ok, so let's accept that the Friendship Paradox is valid, and that for the most part your friends have more friends than you do. But why do they all seem to be happier and to be having more fun than you as well?

Well, it turns out that the Friendship Paradox extends to things like success, wealth, and happiness too. 

From a long-ish piece on the MIT Technology Review site titled How The Friendship Paradox Makes Your Friends Better Than You Are:

To study other types of network, Youg-Ho Eom and Hang-Hyun Jo looked at two academic networks in which scientists are linked if they have co-authored a scientific paper together. Each scientist is a node in the network and the links arise between scientists who have been co-authors.

Sure enough, the paradox raises its head in this network too. If you are a scientist, your co-authors will have more co-authors than you, as reflected in the network topology. But curiously, they will also have more publications and more citations than you too.

Eom and Jo call this the “generalized friendship paradox” and go on to derive the mathematical conditions in which it occurs. They say that when a paradox arises as a result of the way nodes are connected together, any other properties of these nodes demonstrate the same paradoxical nature, as long as they are correlated in certain way.

As it turns out, number of publications and citations meet this criteria. And so too do wealth and happiness. So the answer is yes: your friends probably are richer and happier than you are.

That has significant implications for the way people perceive themselves given that their friends will always seem happier, wealthier and more popular than they are. And the problem is likely to be worse in networks where this is easier to see. “This might be the reason why active online social networking service users are not happy,” say Eom and Jo, referring to other research that has found higher levels of unhappiness among social network users.

So if you’re an active Facebook user feeling inadequate and unhappy because your friends seem to be doing better than you are, remember that almost everybody else on the network is in a similar position.

So there you go, you have learned a new word/term and a little bit on the backstory and research behind a phenomenon that you have undoubtedly experienced, maybe even this past weekend.

You were home raking leaves or fixing the leaky bathroom sink or maybe just glued to your sofa watching football and eating chips while everyone else out there was busy being better looking, having more fun, and just living way larger than you.

Except for me. I assure you I was not one of those people. 

Have a great week!

What's bigger than the World Series? Watching people play video games

This is a short update in a semi-regular series of 'If you are not paying attention, the world is probably a lot different than you think' department I offer up this nugget courtesy of The Atlantic - 'More People Watched the 'League of Legends' Video Game Championships that the World Series'.

Here is the opening from The Atlantic piece, click over to read the rest if you like, but unless you are a fairly serious gamer the first paragraph is probably all you need, (or I need) to make the point:

In October, some 15 million people tuned in to watch Major League Baseball’s World Series in the United States. But that’s nothing compared to the other big sporting tournament that took place around the same time: In late September and early October, 32 million people watched the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship, according to a new report (pdf) from SuperData, a games research company.

Additionally, over 18,000 people (real, actual people) filled the Stapes Center in Los Angeles to watch the finals live. Also, it wasn't just the World Series total viewers that were topped by viewers of League of Legends - the NBA Finals Game 7, the average for the NCAA College Basketball Final Four, and the BCS College Football National Title game all fell short of the 32 miiion people that tuned in to the League of Legends finals.

Why mention this story? Well, it is a Friday and in a nod to yesterday's crowdsourcing post, I kind of am out of other ideas. But seriously, I think this is an incredibly interesting story. Think about it in your own work or personal context - would you ever have thought about the growing popularity of watching other people play video games?

It sounds so silly, right? Who would actually want to watch someone else play a video game?

I am not really sure, but if you think about it for half a minute (and non-emotionally), watching 'real' sports like baseball or football is just as silly as watching people play video games. What is the difference really, except just that baseball and football have been around longer. But those of you who take 4 hours out of your Sunday afternoons to watch your favorite NFL team all Fall/Winter don't have the right to claim any kind of intellectual high ground over the video game fans.

In fact, most of the people who watch the pros play video games do it to try and actually improve their own game playing ability - something that can be said for very few football or baseball fans.

The world is not at all what we think it is at time.s I think it helps our work in HR and Talent, although I could not tell you precisely how, to keep aware of what is going on out in the big, scary world where millions of people are watching video games when you are watching football.

Have a great weekend!

#HRHappyHour LIVE Tonight - 'Social, Brand, and Recruiting'

The HR Happy Hour Show is back and this week we are really excited to welcome back to the show the great Jessica Lee - a recruiting and employer branding thought leader, the original editor and still a contributor at Fistful of Talent, and who is one of the sharpest minds around when it comes to the use of social networks and social media for candidate attraction and engagement. 

Jessica's influence in the world of corporate recruiting is immense - her company Marriott, has done and continues to do some of the most innovative work in corporate talent acquisition, and Jessica is at the forefront of what the rest of us think is the 'future' of recruiting - she and her team are doing it today.

This week we will talk with Jessica about some of the big-picture trends in corporate recruiting, how social approaches to recruiting strategies are actually done in the corporate world, the best ways to conceive and build an employer brand and even hit upon what technologies are having the most impact, and what we can expect to see in the world of recruiting in the future.

You can catch the show in a few different ways - listen to the live stream starting at 8:00PM ET on the show page here, or using the widget player embedded below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

 

You can also listen via the call-in listener line - 646-378-1086, (if you are brave you can even join the fun).

After the show, you can access the replay anytime from the show page, or from the Apple iTunes store - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' in the podcasts area and download the show for free to your iDevice.

And recently, the HR Happy Hour has made it on to Stitcher Radio - the leading iPhone and Android app for podcasts. Just download the free Stitcher Radio app and search for 'HR Happy Hour'. Not only can you get access to all the HR Happy Hour archives on Stitcher, but also to a massive library of podcasts on every subject out there.

I know it will be a great show tonight - for folks that are into talent and social media, (which I think pretty much covers all our listeners), this will be a great opportunity to hear from one of the industry's most accomplished players. 

So this week we think you wil enjoy the conversations on all things recruiting with the great Jessica Lee, of course also joined by the HR Happy Hour hosts - Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane.

It should be a fun show and I hope you can join us!

WEBINAR : Early Adoption: Against HR's Nature?

I'm really pleased to announce that in a few weeks I will be joining the great China Gorman for an upcoming Webinar titled 'Early Adoption: Against HR's Nature?' on Wednesday March 7, 2012 at 1:00PM ET.

.Go ahead, register, it's free!

The Webinar is sponsored by a very cool company called Achievers, (you might still remember them by their former name, I Love Rewards), the leading provider of social recognition solutions in the market today.

What is social recognition?

You know that time your boss stuck his or her head into your office and said, 'Nice job on Project XYZ?', (ok, so if that never happens to you just pretend for a minute), well imagine if that little gesture was posted on a social platform that the rest of your colleagues could see, and perhaps even 'like' or add their own words of thanks and kudos. Then imagine further that you could share this recognition with your friends on Facebook or your professional network on LinkedIn. And one last thing, imagine all these accumulated thanks and kudos would earn some rewards points that you could exchange for some great stuff.

Sounds pretty cool, right?

Achievers provides solutions that let companies do all of that and more, helping to support and build a culture of recognition, openness, and well, I have to say it - achievement.

But in addition to making a great product, the team at Achievers are really active and supportive of the HR community overall, and have sponsored a number of events and webcasts that are designed to share insights, spur conversation, and add to the body of knowledge for the industry. So I am really pleased and honored they asked me to join China in presenting the webinar on March 7.

The central idea behind the topic, 'Early Adoption: Against HR's Nature?', is that while tradtionally HR has been reluctant to be on the leading edge of technology solutions and innovative strategies, that now that time has passed. In the critical areas of employee engagement, the adoption of new technology solutions for talent management gives today’s HR leaders opportunities to recast their function as forward looking rather than history- and compliance-bound. We will also talk about the great results organizations that are on the leading edge are seeing, and how social rewards and social recognition fit in the overall picture.

It should be a really fun webinar, and I hope you will join China and I on March 7th. 

Register, (it's free!), here.