Your Brain Limits You to Just Five BFFs

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601369/your-brain-limits-you-to-just-five-bffs/

by thevibesman • 10 years ago

54 14 10 years ago

thevibesman2• 10 years ago

The team also finds some evidence of an extra layer among some people. “This could, for example, mean introverts and extroverts have a different number of layers of friends,” they suggest. But interestingly, extroverts, while having more friends, still have a similar number of layers.
In total, the study shows good evidence for the existence of the innermost and outermost layers but with some variability for the size of the intermediate layers. “The clustering yields results that match well with previous studies for the innermost and outermost layers, but for layers in between we observe large variability,” they say.

I was curious about those comments in the BBC article, so I took a look at the paper and found this from the conclusions useful:

While the data is noisy, all methods support two different groupings well. This could, for example, mean introverts and extroverts have a different number of layers of friends. Further work could investigate this possibility.
Another suggestion is that over a year, friendships are more transient. Alters could move up or down from one layer to the next on a regular basis. This would reflect the temporal nature of emotional closeness, especially among one’s non-closest friends

thevibesman2• 10 years ago

This article reminded me of a scene from "Flight of the Conchords" where they are discussion how many "the ones" you can have[1]---turns out it is 5.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZGc2sIajMM

mouzogu• 10 years ago

Five sounds about right to me. I remember something about a limit to the number of telephone numbers we could recall from memory. It was in the the same range. Not sure if there is any correlation. Although that actually might be the number of consecutive digits we could recall easily from memory.

ioab• 10 years ago

Robin Dunbar's related book:

http://amzn.com/0571253423

dominotw• 10 years ago

i don't think I have any friends anymore just a bunch of acquaintances.

lkrubner2• 10 years ago

How many? 100? 200? 300? Perhaps 1,000? According to the theory, you could have more acquaintances if you have less friends.

peteforde2• 10 years ago

I can suggest that my own anecdotal experience confirms this. I've grown older and "successful", currently feel like I have no close friends and 1000 friendly acquaintances.

lkrubner2• 10 years ago

How can this possibly be justified:

"To screen out business calls and casual calls, Dunbar and co include only individuals who make reciprocated calls and focus on individuals who call at least 100 other people."

I recall a recent joke about people who carry big book bags onto crowded New York City subways: your book bag is not a gateway to a hyper dimensional space outside of 3 dimensional reality, so please mind what you do with that damn bag, because it takes up a lot of space.

Likewise, your business contacts take up a lot of space. They take time and energy and brainpower, the very thing that would limit the number of people that you can possibly keep track of. Therefore any attempt to exclude business calls invalidates the results.

Retric• 10 years ago

Many business calls are close to interpersonal content free. What are the names of your coworkers children?

tbrownaw• 10 years ago

I've actually met my immediate non-remote coworkers' kids.

PhantomGremlin• 10 years ago

The article doesn't distinguish "friends" from "family".

In my experience they're totally different. Also, the more emotional energy you expend with your family (e.g. dealing with teenagers), the less energy you have left to interact with friends.

peteforde2• 10 years ago

I was not thrilled by the reasoning presented here:

The team also point out that 2007 is a good year to look for Dunbar layers because it predates the widespread use of smartphones and social networks like Facebook. These provide other avenues for social contact that would have made the study much harder.

That's not... a good thing to be bragging about if you're trying to make a point.

First of all, this doesn't acknowledge that lots of people don't like talking on the phone. Further, lots of the closeness that creates intimacy between people can only happen in person. The more I like you, the less I want to spend my time with you on the phone.

The huge problem is that by controlling for Facebook and smartphones, you're ignoring the fact that those technologies have completely re-written the communications story for our species in under a decade. Not to mention that there's an entire generation that have come up at a time where texting and Facebook have always been there, so to exclude these mediums renders all of these conclusions not as analysis of how people communicate today but a record of how some people used to communicate in a previous era. It's not useful, it's cultural history.

The questions that are far more interesting now are around whether things like social media have started to affect our capacity for meaningful relationships. Surely while some of this stuff is biology, some of it was also a function of it simply being harder to keep in contact with 1000 people before 2007 for most people.

hydromet• 10 years ago

How fascinating considering Facebook sends emails to those who have resigned from Facebook, playing and preying on people's emotions with marketing messages the likes of, "you may have more friends than you realize awaiting you on Facebook", implying more is merrier and inducing the emotion of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Hmm, this is Zuckerberg's way of profiting off of people's emotions eh?

pvaldes• 10 years ago

Your brain limits you to just five real friends... and we together can stop acronym abuse.

Your Brain Limits You to Just Five BFFs

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