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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: 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?