Generalized Friendship Paradoxes in Network Science

Abstract

Generalized friendship paradoxes occur when, on average, our friends have more of some attribute than us. These paradoxes are relevant to many aspects of human interaction, notably in social science and epidemiology. Here, we derive new theoretical results concerning the inevitability of a paradox arising, using a linear algebra perspective. Following the seminal 1991 work of Scott L. Feld, we consider two distinct ways to measure and compare averages, which may be regarded as global and local. For global averaging, we show that a generalized friendship paradox holds for a large family of walk-based centralities, including Katz centrality and total subgraph communicability, and also for nonbacktracking eigenvector centrality. Defining loneliness as the reciprocal of the number of friends, we show that for this attribute the generalized friendship paradox always holds in reverse. In this sense, we are always more lonely, on average, than our friends. We also derive a global averaging paradox result for the case where the arithmetic mean is replaced by the geometric mean. The nonbacktracking eigenvector centrality paradox is also established for the case of local averaging.

Please cite this paper as:

@article{higham2025generalized,
  title={Generalized Friendship Paradoxes in Network Science},
  author={Higham, Desmond J. and Hrobat, Francesco and Tudisco, Francesco},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.11742},
  year={2025}
}

Keywords: friendship paradox networks eigenvector centrality nonbacktracking linear algebra