Friends to the endHOW many Facebook friends do you have? For some, the answer can be a signal of social success, and the numbers claimed can be enormous: Facebook permits 5,000 of them (though these might include products and companies as well as people). But Robin Dunbar, a psychologist at Oxford University, has long reckoned that claims of vast numbers of Facebook friends do not say much about actual human relationships. This week, as he describes in a paper in Royal Society Open Science, he is even more certain.
Dr Dunbar is the eponymous originator of Dunbar’s number, a rough measure of the number of stable relationships that individuals can maintain. He came up with it in 1993, when he was studying the brains of social primates. He found a correlation between the average size of each species’s neocortex (a recently evolved part of the brain) and that of their social groups. Extrapolating the results to humans, he reckoned, meant they should have social circles—of close friends and relatives, and frequently seen acquaintances—of about 150 people. And that is what he...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1ZEvzvo
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