Sites like Facebook allow us to stay connected and maintain friendships with hundreds and sometimes thousands of people at a time but it can often feel like these friendships aren’t really true friendships at all. In 2016, Dr. Dunbar, an evolutionary sociologist and cognition of the University of Oxford, published a paper posing the question of whether social media is able to prop up the size of offline social networks which have previously been shown to be constrained by our cognitive abilities and in part by the time costs of servicing such relationships.
Results from 3373 users on Facebook between 18 and 65 years old were studied which on average had 150 friends. Of those 150, 4.1 were considered to be dependable, and 13.6 were considered to express sympathy during an “emotional crisis”. In Dunbar’s earlier work, these numbers align closely with the figures calculated from studying “offline” friendships.
In his paper he notes “Respondents who had unusually large networks did not increase the numbers of close friendships they had, but rather added more loosely defined acquaintances into their friendship circle.” The ease of creating friendships in these online environments makes it difficult to invest in maintaining an essential level of “emotional intensity”
This figure shows the frequency distributions of what people identified were the number of “close” friends in their support clique and the number of friends in their sympathy group they had.
This information is interesting because in class we have talked about how in friend graphs there are usually tightly coupled components of “strong” friendships of which are connected to other tightly coupled components by weak edges which represent a more distant friendship. This paper makes the important observation that the graph representations of this online friend data and that of the real friendship graph made up of your offline friendships, are statistically similar and analogous and that just because you may have 150 Facebook friends, doesn’t mean they necessarily contribute to what you would consider your real friends. In other words, it seems that this study agrees with Dunbar’s previous research about the limits and constraints of maintaining human relationships.
Source: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.150292