Post by Lone Wanderer on Oct 7, 2018 1:39:11 GMT
You cannot have 1,000 real friends on Facebook. Nor 500. In fact, anything over 200 starts seeming unlikely, according to a new study.
Limitations on brain capacity and free time mean humans can nurture no more than about 150 true friendships on social media, just as in real life, the study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science says.
The rest are acquaintances, or people recognised on sight.
A theoretical limit of 150 friends has become known as "Dunbar's Number" after British evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar, who coined the concept. He also authored the new study, and concluded the same limits applied online.
"There is some flexibility, perhaps, but not very much, and it mostly depends on how weak or strong you want your friendships to be," Professor Dunbar said.
"It is as though we each have a limited amount of social capital and we can choose to invest it thinly in more people, or thickly in fewer people. But you can't exceed these limits."
The rest are acquaintances, or people recognised on sight.
A theoretical limit of 150 friends has become known as "Dunbar's Number" after British evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar, who coined the concept. He also authored the new study, and concluded the same limits applied online.
"There is some flexibility, perhaps, but not very much, and it mostly depends on how weak or strong you want your friendships to be," Professor Dunbar said.
"It is as though we each have a limited amount of social capital and we can choose to invest it thinly in more people, or thickly in fewer people. But you can't exceed these limits."
What is Dunbar's number?
- Hypothesis suggests our brain can only handle 150 close relationships.
- First proposed in 1990s by anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar.
- Theory applies to physical and social networks.
We have on average five intimate friends, 15 best friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends, 500 acquaintances and 1,500 people we recognise on sight.
"The 150 layer is the important one: this defines the people you have real reciprocated relationships with, those where you feel obligations and would willingly do favours," he said.
"People can (and sometimes do) have 500 or even 1,000 friends on Facebook, but all they are doing is including people who we would normally call acquaintances or people we just recognise by sight but don't know very well."
"The 150 layer is the important one: this defines the people you have real reciprocated relationships with, those where you feel obligations and would willingly do favours," he said.
"People can (and sometimes do) have 500 or even 1,000 friends on Facebook, but all they are doing is including people who we would normally call acquaintances or people we just recognise by sight but don't know very well."
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Alternative numbers
Anthropologist H. Russell Bernard, Peter Killworth and associates have done a variety of field studies in the United States that came up with an estimated mean number of ties, 290, which is roughly double Dunbar's estimate. The Bernard–Killworth median of 231 is lower, due to upward straggle in the distribution, but still appreciably larger than Dunbar's estimate. The Bernard–Killworth estimate of the maximum likelihood of the size of a person's social network is based on a number of field studies using different methods in various populations. It is not an average of study averages but a repeated finding. Nevertheless, the Bernard–Killworth number has not been popularized as widely as Dunbar's.
Source:
but I will admit I don't know about 15 to 20 of them personally, the rest I do know personally.
