Is It Possible To Befriend All Your Facebook / Instagram Connections?

Our ability to socialize is limited by our available brain resources. There is an upper limit to human social groups, determined by the Dunbar number, which is 150.

You might have often stared at the huge number of friends on your Facebook or followers on Instagram/Twitter and wondered… Are these people really my ‘friends’? Are all these people relevant to my life?

Further studies revealed a precise hierarchical structure within human groups. Human groups were ruled by a factor of three. If you have 150 people you know, 50 of them would form a close group, and 15 of them would form an even more tight-knit group of friends, followed by 5 people with whom you share the closest bond. Thus, Dunbar’s number explains not the quantity or number of friends you can have, but rather the quality or number of ‘meaningful’ social connections.

Some criticisms of this work emerged over time, claiming that human relationships are not as simple as those in primates and are governed by cultural factors, not biological ones. However, such claims lacked any substantial evidence and remain at the level of hypothesis.

The Virtual Social Network

One would think that the internet would have helped us easily jump over primitive hurdles, such as limited neocortex size while socializing. Surely, using Facebook or Instagram makes it easy to maintain real relationships as compared to ancient times.

We would all agree that tagging one acquaintance in a group picture or posting a birthday wish for them online is a much simpler task than mailing a letter, let alone personally grooming and bonding with each of our connections like in ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Funnily enough, this is not the case. Our virtual social networking was also found to be ruled by Dunbar’s number!

A study of user behavior on Twitter showed that over six months, users could stably maintain an average of only 150 relationships! Maintaining stable connections online also required the interactions and attention of an individual, which is a limited resource.

Similarly, a study on students using Facebook revealed that although they had an average of about 300 Facebook connections, most only considered roughly 75 of them as actual friends!

Whether virtual or real, social networking seems to be ruled by Dunbar’s number!

A Final Word

Humans are highly evolved primates. We may have introduced new technologies, such as the internet, which makes our life easy, but the truth remains that we are just “Primates with the internet” and are no different from other primates when it comes to social behavior.

evolution. From monkey to businessman and computer user(MicroOne)S” class=”wp-image-34682 size-full” height=”349″ src=”https://uploads.scienceabc.com/2020/03/Human-evolution.-From-monkey-to-businessman-and-computer-userMicroOneS.jpg” width=”1000″/> Our brain continues to limit our social interactions, with or without the internet (Photo Credit : MicroOne/Shutterstock)

Online or offline, our ability to socialize is limited by brain resources that we can afford to allocate for this particular function. The upper limit to our social groups remains at the Dunbar number, 150.

There is simply a limitation to how much of our brain’s resources can be devoted to socializing. There is no cheat sheet to making more friends—even with the internet to help!