I was watching kurzgesagt's video on loneliness and picked up a sentence that says "population based studies have shown that social skills make practically no difference for adults when it comes to social connections", with animations showing social/non-social people ending up with random number of social connections. [1/2]
I went to check their source, a npr science piece titled "New Research Finds Lonely People Have Superior Social Skills". It seems reasonable to support the claim, except the "research" was "Choking under social pressure: Social monitoring among the lonely". These people were lonely due to poor performance of social skills rather than the lack thereof, but I'd say that's socially awkward in either case.
So: information distortion in only 2 hops, and lonely people do research seriously 
