The size of your Facebook posse is unrelated to happiness, but doubling the number of your real-world friends has an emotional impact akin to a 50% raise. (click below to read more)
Those are among the findings of a new paper that relied on a survey of 5,025 Canadians randomly chosen from a pool of Internet users. The paper, which focused on "subjective well-being," also found that the biggest gains in what the rest of us call happiness came in moving from fewer than 10 real-world friends into the category of 10 to 20 friends, beyond which gains in well-being were small. Overall, 80% of respondents were in those two categories.
Not surprisingly, real-life friends were a lot more important to people who were single, divorced, separated or widowed than they were to the married or cohabiting.
"Comparing the Happiness Effects of Real and On-line Friends," John F. Helliwell and Haifang Huang, NBER Working Paper No. 18690 (January)
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