Here’s the number of friends you can actually have in real life, according to science
A report issued by MIT Technology Review states that you can only have five close friends
THOUGHT you were popular? A study says you can actually count your number of true friends on one hand.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who works at the University of Oxford, believes that there’s a limit on the amount of meaningful relationships humans can really have.
Among a person’s 150 contacts, Professor Dunbar believes that there are different layers of friendship depending on how close you are with someone.
The study analysed how often 35 million people rang their friends, using the frequency to gauge the strength of the relationships.
The tech review explained: “The team assumes that the frequency of calls between two individuals is a measure of the strength of their relationship.
“The average cumulative layer turns out to hold 4.1, 11.0, 29.8, and 128.9 users.”
Surprisingly, it found that social butterflies even people have the same amount of layers as introverts.
The online world has allowed social networks to flourish, but Dunbar believes it’s only possible to maintain friendships with around 150 of them.
The study suggests that: “This is because friendships ultimately require occasional face-to-face interaction if they are to be maintained over time.”
After analysing the social relationships of over 3,300 people, Professor Dunbar concluded that participants only considered 28 per cent of their Facebook network to be ‘true friends’.
As well as this, they revealed that they could only turn to 4 per cent of their friends list in an emergency.
Surprisingly, test subjects that had significantly more than 155 Facebook friends admitted that they only had a small circle of true dependable friends.
Professor Dunbar claims that Facebook can be a useful tool for maintaining relationships when you can’t “readily meet friends face-to-face”.
However, he explains: “No amount of social media will prevent a friend eventually becoming ‘just another acquaintance’ if you don’t meet face-to-face from time to time.”