Friends make you happy, healthy, and they'll be there for you when the rain starts to pour. But how many of them do you need? Turns out the show Friends had the science all figured out.
Back in the early 90s, British anthropologist Dr. Robin Dunbar came to an interesting conclusion: humans could likely only maintain social relationships with an average of 148 individuals due to the size of our brain's neocortex, or what's known as Dunbar's Number. More social information processing demands requires more cognitive resources, and we only have so much brain power. Basically, we tend to top out at having 150 meaningful relationships in our lives, whether they're family, friends, or casual acquaintances. Your Facebook might have hundreds or thousands of "friends," but a good chunk of them, if not most, are out of mind.
Later on, Dunbar's research led to the concept of "Dunbar's layers", where the emotional closeness between individuals was taken into account. This meant that your relationships looked more like layers instead of a cloud of 150 people. The closest layer has three to five people, the next layer has 15 people, then 50, and so on. That inner layer is what makes up your "vital friendships," or your inner circle of close friends. These are people that you should have in your life to meet up with regularly, talk about personal matters, and maintain a strong emotional connection. In the show Friends, each main character—Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe, Monica, and Chandler—these five people in their life, making it a pretty decent model to follow on a biological and sociological level. If you can manage to maintain three to five close friendships in the same way, you're far more likely be content. After all, who wouldn't be better off with people who will always be there for you?
https://lifehacker.com/this-is-how-many-friends-you-need-to-be-happy-1823425885
Do you agree with this premise ? If yes, where do you stand on the "number of friends" scale ?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:10AM (7 children)
Sounds right in my case, except that I have an inner sanctum of 5 (some of whom I've known since before high school) and a next layer of 15ish, but nothing else after that by choice. I enjoy bullshitting with the anonymous folks here but that's something I can walk away from and come back to at will.
Said this before many times, but if people can't be assed to call, text, IM, e-mail, or snail-mail me; then they are not worth worrying about as I have no social media/online presence. As kind of an introvert socializing can be exhausting and I get more than a day's worth at work and can't tolerate more than 3 full days (like, when I'm staying with them) with even my closest friends. Nothing personal.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:54AM (6 children)
You've got a friend? What's that like?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @06:43AM (2 children)
Eth has a friend. It is like in that movie, with James Stewart, you know, the six foot tall rabbit, a Pooka, from Norse mythology, and being ethanol fueled. Nobody else can see them, but that does not mean they are not there! Fair Winds, Ethanol_Fueled!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 04 2018, @11:36AM
Norse?! Harvey and all his kin are most definitely celtic.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @09:54PM
I really miss comedian Richard Jeni[1] AKA Platypus Man.
He had a routine where 2 people are seeing if they are compatible and they put their cards on the table, comparing how psychotic they are.
Imaginary friends come into play. [google.com]
[1] His suicide at age 49 is another reason that I don't favor the ready availability of firearms to USAians.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 04 2018, @06:44AM (2 children)
The easy answer is being able to talk to them like I talk to you all here on SN, only in real-life, and get approval for it even if there are disagreements. The kinda people you can talk to in real life with no filter. Of course, those are good friends, there are the crappier friends who wouldn't tolerate A. Wyatt Mann drawings very well and believe in gun control because CNN tells them to.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:06PM
So you really ARE a klan member!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @03:29AM
I had to look up Wyatt Mann, thinking I would get some post-modern art. A very nostalgic surprise to see comics from my middle school years. I always thought it was just pre-color Benjamin Grrrison mockups.
I don't even believe, but all that comes to mind is "God Bless." Funny stuff.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:17AM
No friends. No family. Just me now. Me all alone.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:53AM (1 child)
But he raised the price. So now I do without.
(Score: 3, Funny) by arslan on Monday March 05 2018, @12:26AM
Here's a solution for you lonely AC... be the one charging the price.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @06:30AM (3 children)
Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @06:44AM
I have no surviving enemies [wikiquote.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 04 2018, @06:51AM (1 child)
Having enemies means that you are important enough to have enemies.
Even when everybody at work or school is badmouthing you, it is still all about you. Never underestimate the capacity for mobs of people to lower themselves down to the level of the third-grade schoolyard.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @10:09PM
A gnat is often held up as an example of insignificance (the attention span of a gnat; a gnat's ass).
Despite their insignificance, a great many folks find them to be irritating.
So, no. Making someone else's life less pleasant doesn't afford an entity importance.
It typically gets you brushed aside or squashed like a bug.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @07:13AM (1 child)
I've noticed my limits of how many people's relations I can track. I read a lot of web comics, manga, visual novels, and books, and watch a lot of anime and a few other shows. Some of this content updates serially and has been running for years (decades even in some rare cases). I've exceeded the number of characters I can actually track at any given time, and fail to really relate to and enjoy some of the series that happen to fall beyond my limits. I'll come back to a comic I loved a few months ago, and find sometimes I don't really properly emotionally recall the characters and their relations. It takes a story that I was invested in, and couldn't wait for the next issue and turns it into one I haven't caught up on in months. Losing that is separate from remembering the rest of the story, it has its own limit. Since I first hit that limit, its remained relatively constant over the years. I can enjoy and relate to the couple most important characters in ~30 series at most, so maybe 90 characters
Of course there are also maybe 40 real people who I interact with (mostly through work and sports), but thats not anywhere near though to get me to the limit. Sometimes I wonder if my inability to track my ~80 coworkers is because I find them less important to remember than a lot of the fictional people in my life.
At times I've invested some of my capacity to remembering players of professional sports teams and their details (as part of social interactions with my family), or political figures. I also remember a few online personalities from various technical a and educational circles.
Overall it adds up to around 150. So for me Dunbar's Number seems to be about right.
I haven't thought as much about the lower levels much, but I have noticed I clearly have more limited capacity for tracking truly detailed views of peoples social interactions. When I binge a series, I am able to experience it at this level, but if I receive it episodically I have very limited capacity for track multiple series at once and the fidelity of the social modeling degrades.
I wonder if people who are super into actors, sports etc. tend to spend a lot of their capacities there. I suspect Dunbar's Number impacts peoples ability to track pop culture.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:02PM
I think it relates to other aspects as well. It's not so much about people as it is about remaining aware, informed, and engaged within a specific closed system with the occasional rotation/turnover (in and out) of objects/entities that have numerous data points associated with them. That's not as catchy of a title, though.
What does that mean...? Well, about 150 is the number of Dwarves I can track in Dwarf Fortress before they become meaningless statistics that have to be dealt with, but is hard to keep personal track of each dwarven entity and all of the objects they deal with.
I have the most potential engagement in the well-being of my bearded brethren when the count is below 80. I can easily find someone to follow closely but am at least keeping tabs on the populace if at or below that amount), I do it better below 50, and I know everything about everybody when it's below 30 or so.
If it gets large (babies, migrants, or success), then it quickly turns into a deal with the problems and try to keep tabs on the first 20 or so dwarves, or at the very least, the original 7 starting dwarves... provided they survived that long..
I can't say that the dwarves make up a social network in real life, though, but it sounds like "the social network" of a given person is more about object management than how many friends a person can have (provided one can make and keep such friends, or business associates, or remember the specific IP addresses of 150 different devices and their configurations, or their names, and what they all do and... it's just the typical limit of a person's ability to track objects in a closed system.
We are all capable of tracking many more on a system level, because if that was the true limit, our social networks would prevent our ability to work and vice versa, just due to the memory limitations of our personal object management systems... I couldn't tell you what the limits are for how many systems of systems we can track, but like all things, some people do it better with others, and some people do it better with a seperate system to help track the contents of each system (a social network, a database, a text file, a paper notebook, etc).
Anyway, someone seems to present this study or one like it every few years. Is this one any different, or did they just get access to facebooks API or something? At least it confirms previous observations (and years of Dwarf Fortress playing anecdotally backs that up). Technology isn't able to make people track things in granular detail any better as far as personal capabilities getting better; it is just allowing for more convenient and accessible lookups within the closed network in question, I think. Our brain's ability to track things has remained the same, but better systems to track things have been made by our brains. That probably in turn reduces our need to remember as much, allowing us to focus on our more personally relevant details in greater granularity than we otherwise may have been afforded previously.
Or we will evolve to just remember good looking people in ads.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @12:47PM (2 children)
And what of extreme introverts who have no desire to have friends? Or are they necessarily unhappy because this person said so? Not only that, but good luck scientifically determining whether someone is actually happy or not.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @04:52PM
The problem is that most of the "friends" are not friends at all. They are just someone you know of, and they know of you. Friends take an *emotional* toll on you to keep around, so having more than a few is too many anyway. Or you just ignore them and have more?
Family is inner 2 circles except maybe for a few close friends. The rest is noise that doesn't matter. 150? I top out at probably 20. And now, only 1 other in the inner circle and that's more than most of my life.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday March 05 2018, @11:27AM
You are giving an outlier to try to break an average. For every super introvert you might quote, there's someone on the opposite end of the scale who knows and can keep track on the happenings of an order of magnitude more than your average person. The politicians, the movie producers and the police. The people who have an amazing capacity to keep track of the lives of others, and maintain these personal or professional relationships with hundreds of people beyond the 150, or keep a lot more people in a closer 'tier' to themselves.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday March 04 2018, @02:54PM
What are these "friends" of which you speak?
It sounds as if you are saying there should be someone that would NOT eventually stab me in the back. Preposterous! Completely preposterous!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 04 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
Yeah and I base my political views entirely off Harry Potter and my environmental views solely off Mad Max movies (the good old ones not the remakes) I'm not saying any of the article is wrong, but there exists a design pattern where using fiction as a citation source in a theoretically non-fiction is usually an indication of extremely low quality. Across the board, not just sociology studies.
Again just to repeat, I'm not even claiming any of the article or summary is wrong, merely that their narrative strategy is one of the least trustworthy strategies out there; what were they thinking?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @05:11PM
Narrative strategy? "making it a pretty decent model to follow on a biological and sociological level."
They are using a well known cultural story to illustrate their point about the size of your close personal circle. That you have a problem with such a metaphor shows more about you than anything else. This isn't some ideology to take from the show and put into your own life. Its just a metaphor dude.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @11:21AM
They feel the need to name each Friends character individually.
I mean, if someone here wrote 'The main Star Trek characters - that's Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura and Chekov - ...', how seriously would they be taken?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bobs on Sunday March 04 2018, @08:42PM
Sounds valid, leaves me with questions about specific individual variance of implementation of the numbers:
So, on average, peoples' circles are 5/ 15/ 150.
Could one person's numbers be 1/ 5/ 20 and another person's be 20/ 100/ 1,000?
Varying capacities might have a correlation with introversion and extroversion, etc.
Personally, I suspect I am more in the range of 1-4/ 10/ 20.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Sunday March 04 2018, @11:50PM (2 children)
Only tangentially on topic but I just wanted to take this opportunity to say:
1. I find the TV show mind numbingly dull and unfunny. The jokes are the most obvious, simplistic humor I have ever come across (which the laugh track makes worse) and the characters are the blandest, dullest bunch of stupid, superficial normies (and I don't really like that term, but can't think of a better way to describe them). I know they're supposed to be a mix of different personalities, like Phoebe is supposed to be weird and Ross is supposed to be nerdy but I don't find it convincing. It all just seems so overrated to me -- I can't understand why it's so universally popular. I think some people just watch it because they're attracted to the characters but they don't do anything for me! I'm probably in a minority even here regarding all this, but, well, I said it.
2. Most friends these days expect you to follow them on social media. If you don't use it, you're the outcast, not them. Don't think they will bother to maintain an e-mail account (it'll probably just get pwned anyway) or even pick up the phone for you. Nobody does that anymore.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @11:25AM (1 child)
Friends who expect you to follow them on social media are not your friends.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday March 05 2018, @07:03PM
You're right if it's an explicit condition on the friendship. Both people must maintain an effort to keep in touch for a friendship to last, using whatever communication channels both are comfortable with. If however you yourself place too many preconditions on what qualifies as a friend, it can get a bit No True Scotsman. If you only permit people that are good at socializing outside of social media, and of those only people that share a certain number of common interests, and of those only people you can speak your mind unfiltered to, and of those only people that are honest, your shortlist can dwindle to next to nothing pretty quickly. It's kinda like a Venn diagram!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @04:00AM
If you want long term social relationships with less intelligent life forms how about dogs or other animals?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/18/why-smart-people-are-better-off-with-fewer-friends/ [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @11:16AM
I found my maximum for time, attention and maintenance topped out at seven gadgets (one iPhone, two Android phones, a Nokia dumbphone, two tablets and a Kindle), four laptops (two Windows, one Linux and one hybrid) and a smart watch.
Oh - you said people! ...To hell with that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 05 2018, @07:50PM (2 children)
I have only 2 close friends, those being my current girlfriend and an ex (not the crazy one) and maybe 10 acquaintances, and that's plenty enough. And several of those 10 are co-workers at either job. Some of us just don't seem to need as much social contact. I really would like a cat though...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday March 06 2018, @02:41AM (1 child)
Ever tried pet rats? They're really very sweet once you get to know them. All of the independence and intelligence of cats, with all of the affection of a dog. Animals of prey, so no real violent tendencies sitting beneath the surface (unless of course they're badly badly threatened, then cornered.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @07:13AM
Cats will poop in the 1 place where they can bury it.[1]
You can even get a cat to poop into the toilet with something like Litter Kwitter. [google.com]
Rodents just poop wherever they are.
[1] Q. Why don't they allow lawyers at the beach?
A. Cats keep trying to bury them.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]