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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: 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.