Think Other People Have More Friends Than You? You’re Probably Wrong

If you've ever felt bad about how small your social circle seems compared to everyone else's, fear not. A new study finds that most people overestimate how large the social groups of people around them are, according to Business Insider. In other words, people think others are way more popular than they actually are.

The study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by researchers at the University of British Columbia, explored the prevalence of this misconception among first-year college students. Because freshmen are just entering a new social environment, many are leaving their longstanding social circles behind for the larger, unfamiliar territory of college life. They might not have made very many friends yet, but it appears that most believe that their peers have.

The two experiments surveyed a total of almost 1500 students combined. In the first, almost 1100 second-semester freshmen were asked about the number of close friends and acquaintances they had made at school—distinguished by whether or not they confided personal problems in them or not—then to estimate how many friends the other first-year students had made in the same time period. Almost half the students thought that others had more close friends at school than they did, while just 31 percent estimated that they had more close friends at school than others did. The same went for the number of acquaintances they had. The students reported having an average of 3.6 close friends of their own, but thought that others had an average of 4.2 close friends.

In the second experiment, the researchers followed almost 390 students, divided into two groups, for two years, asking them the same questions as in the first experiment. They also asked what percentage of their total time they spent socializing with friends they made prior to coming to college as well as what percentage of time they spent socializing with other students they met at UBC. They estimated how much time others spent on the same activities, then completed questionnaires on their well-being, life-satisfaction, loneliness, and sense of belonging.

Again, most of the students thought that other people had more friends than they did, and estimated that their peers spent more time socializing with their new college friends than they themselves did. This misperception extended even to their specific close friends and acquaintances, who they believed spent more time socializing with their other new friends than they did. However, the more time the participant spent with said friends and acquaintances, the smaller the gap between perception and reality were. Importantly, people who believed that everyone else was more popular than they were reported lower levels of well-being and a lower sense of belonging.

This misreading of others' experiences may in part be due to the fact that a lot of social activities are very visible, whereas hanging out by yourself is, by nature, not. Eating with a bunch of people in the dining hall is a public activity that others can see, whereas few people see you studying alone in your room. "This could make it difficult for students to imagine the prevalence of their peers' solitary activities and therefore to over-rely on peers' publicly visible social activities to estimate their peers' social connectedness," the researchers write.

The study only examined the perceptions of young people who find themselves in a totally new social environment, but it's easy to imagine that the same misperception could exist outside of college, too. It's not the only misconception we tend to have about friendship, after all. In 2016, a study revealed a depressing stat: As many as half of your friendships might be one-sided, meaning you consider someone your friend, but they don't consider you theirs.

It turns out, when it comes to our social lives, most of us have no idea what's going on.