You Can Only Have 5 Close Friends At Any Point In Time, Finds Study

What is the most common thing about all these groups? They are all made up of five to six people. This means that each member has four to five friends. What is so special about this? Research suggests that THAT is the most number of close friends a human will have in his lifetime.

A new research has shown that any human being is capable of having no more than 150 relationships at any given point of time, and a maximum of 4 to 5 close ones from them.

This is known as the Social Brain Hypothesis. It suggests that while evolving from primates, our brains developed to a certain size to accommodate only a limited amount of social interaction. More social activity means having more close relationships. This is possible only to a certain limit for our brains.

 

Research by Pádraig MacCarron, Kimmo Kaski, and Robin Dunbar shows that human relationships are arranged in layers, each one having a different amount of closeness.

Human relationships and social contacts can be arranged in a kind of layered system, which is also known as the Dunbar Layers. In this, the smallest one has four to five close relationships and these are our closest. With each successive layer, the number of people go on increasing, but the level of closeness with them goes on decreasing. This is true for roughly all humans with a social network.

 

The researchers analysed phone call data of 34.9 million users all over Europe from the year 2007 to arrive to the conclusion of their hypothesis.

Analysing over 6 billion calls made in the single year, it was found that the Dunbar Layers exhibited in real life social circles. On an average people had 4.1 close friends with whom they exchanged the most number of calls. As the distributions went on increasing, it was observed that fewer number of calls were made to more number of people. The last distribution showed an average of 128.9 people, very close to the 150 people approximation in the Social Brain Hypothesis.

 

Mind you, this research is free from bias because the first iPhone was just launched and Facebook was just beginning to gain momentum in the year 2007. So smartphones and social networks did not change the findings.

This new research brings social interaction under a whole new light, and might be usable for studying human relationships further.

How many close friends do you have?
Can you count them on one hand?

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Fact source: arXiv:1604.02400
Cover image source