Figure 2

Overview of the magnitude of the Happiness and Friendship paradox for the sample of Twitter subjects; individuals positioned above the diagonal experience a Happiness or Friendship paradox. (B1) Happiness Paradox: Distribution of individual Happiness (x-axis) vs. average Happiness of one’s friend’s average (y-axis). Happiness is measured in terms of longitudinal Subjective Well-Being (SWB) scores. Subjects above the red paradox line experience lower happiness (SWB) than their friends’ average. The distribution of SWB scores places a majority of subjects well above the diagonal Paradox line. Ellipses indicate the boundaries of 2 Gaussian Mixture Model components used to demarcate a Happy (red) and Unhappy (blue) groups of subjects. Paradox magnitudes are expressed in terms of the percentage of users who experience lower happiness than their friends. The 95% confidence intervals are calculated by a 5,000-fold bootstrapping of a 10% sample to determine the sensitivity of our results to random network sampling variations. (B2) and (B3) Friendship Paradox: Distribution of individual Popularity (x-axis) vs. average Popularity of one’s Friends (y-axis). Popularity is measured in terms of \(\operatorname{log}(\mathrm{degree})\) in the Friendship network. Subjects above the red paradox line experience lower popularity than their friends on average. As shown, we find significant Happiness and Friendship Paradoxes for all users, but Happy users experience a stronger Friendship Paradox whereas Unhappy users experience a stronger Happiness Paradox.