Well-known psychologist Robin Dunbar is famous for having many years ago uncovered the association between brain size and the relative size of human social groups. Dunbar identified that the size of the neocortex in the human brain, correlates with social group size, and specifically he observed that the ideal number for human group sizes was consistently found to be somewhere between 100-200 personal relationships.

His discovery, which is referred to as Dunbar's number, asserts that there is an ideal number of relationships that can be maintained by the human brain, that there is a limit to how many we can keep up with.

But maybe things are different now, because social media now enables us to have thousands of connections/friendships online.

Dunbar himself sought to look into whether or not things have changed over the years, since social media has become much more popular, with billions of people familiar with it and using it on a regular basis. Dunbar utilized a survey which randomly sampled about 2,000 social network users and about 1,375 who didn't use social media on a regular basis. The questions on the survey asked them about how many friends they had on sites like Facebook etc, as well as the details on the closeness of those relationships.

What Did They Discover?

Their research demonstrated that things are still pretty much the same. Despite those folks who have thousands of friends on their Twitter, Facebook, and other social network pages, the average number of friendships that we're able to maintain is still around 150 to 180 people.

For those who spent the most time online, they responded that only about 28 percent of their connections on Facebook are even genuine. And for those who could be considered a close friend, the percentage got even smaller.

There has been a decent amount of research that has been conducted to look into Facebook and it's implications on different facets of our lives and society etc, and this study contributes to the understanding of how Facebook might be changing the way that we go about managing our personal relationships.

This tool allows us to stay connected with people all over the world and Dunbar has suggested that perhaps social media enables people to prevent their friendships from fading and deteriorating. Many of us are living busy lives and can't always get the time to make face-to-face contact with the ones that we care about and love, and social media helps us to still feel connected to those people and gently maintain those connections. But evidence suggests that it doesn't improve our chances of being able to maintain genuinely close friendships with thousands of people.

Pics:
Pixabay
Sources:
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/1/150292
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2016/01/28/thousands-of-facebook-friends-your-brain-doesnt-care/#531384cc4b48