This is not exactly news (and this blog isn't about news), but a few experts at the London Institute of Psychiatry is of the collective opinion that your popularity can be estimated numerically by knowing how your peers rate a few of your traits. I am a big fan of "The Naked scientists", the humor filled science podcast from BBC, to which I highly recommend you subscribe to. In one of the episodes, they mentioned this formula in a telephonic quiz.
(32C + 16F + 11H + 14P + 15A)
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4.4
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4.4
where,
C is Contact with friends,
F is Facilitating entertainment (the F factor?),
H is Humour,
P is Personality and
A is Attractiveness
Each of the factors are to be rated on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being 'Aaarrgh!' and 5 being 'ooohhh!'. Substitute the values in the formula to get your popularity rating on a scale from 0 to 100. No cheating.
Here's a tiny calculator that I coded for you to easily calculate your popularity once you have the values for the individual factors from your friends:
The formula must've been derived off the inference from some statistical study data. As can be deduced from the formula, the highest weightage is given to 'Contact with friends' while Humour is given the least. Also, Attractiveness is given more weightage than Humour and Personality.
So, according to the formula, that handsome and funny guy with a friend list spreading across juniors to seniors, throwing a party at any excuse of an occasion he could find is the most popular, while that geek with his small band of geek friends, sharing jargon jokes that no non-geek would find funny, would rather have another frag session than go to a party, with the groovy einstein hair-style and a hyperactive sebacious gland, is the least popular guy. So the formula does hold water.
Ignoring the extremes, we can also infer from the formula that that guy who has all the lame jokes to tell a large involuntary friends base is more popular than that guy who is genuinely funny but with a lesser friend base.
It would be interesting to see the popularity rating of a population over the last few years. With the proliferation of mobile phones, email, IM, smart phones, blogging and skype-like networks the C factor would've shot up the roof.
The result may also depend on the age group of the friend circle we are talking of. Some thoughts on age as a factor:
*Do the youth have more time for actually keeping in touch with the huge friend base, or do the old and the retired do?
*Who is more funny does depend on age, but it doesn't have enough weightage in the formula.
*Personality? I do believe that older people tend to rate each other highly in this category.
*Facilitating entertainment is more of young people thing, I would expect.
*Attractiveness? Surely it is inversely proportional with age (after middle age).
So, send an email/IM asking a few of your friends to rate you on the above mentioned factors, come to this page, calculate your rating for each friend and finally average the ratings to get your final Popularity rating. Send them your rating of them as well so that you can compare it with your friends' ratings. If his is lower, you can use it poke fun of his being more of a geek.
I asked around a few of my friends and came up with a rating of 78. If you would like to have a better score than your friends, then you know what to do: rate him lower :)
