Extraversion may be less common than we think

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/afps-emb040615.php

Public Release: 6-Apr-2015
Association for Psychological Science

Social scientists have long known that, statistically speaking, our friends are more popular than we are. It's a simple matter of math: Because popular people have more friends, they are disproportionately represented in social networks-which guarantees that on average, our friends have more friends than we do.

New research by researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College extends this so-called "friendship paradox" with a study of personality, documenting a "network extraversion bias" within the emerging social networks of a new class of MBA students.

Not only did the researchers show that extraverts are over-represented in real-world networks, they found that the effect is more pronounced in the networks of socially outgoing people. In other words, extraverted people are not immune from the friendship paradox-they experience it more intensely than others.

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"If you're more extraverted, you may really have a skewed view of how extraverted other people are in general," Feiler says. "If you're very introverted you might actually have a pretty accurate idea."

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According to Feiler and Kleinbaum's research, only the most introverted people-just 1 percent of the population- can be expected to have networks that are representative of the population in terms of extraversion.

The rest of us view our social world through a distorted lens-a kind of carnival mirror that could create the impression that others are more social than we are. This could have profound effects on our job performance, relationships, and self-esteem. Having biased social perceptions could also hurt leaders or product developers.

"There's a human tendency to wonder, 'Am I normal?'" Feiler says. "And our research suggests that you're probably more normal than you think."