Human brain only copes with 150 Facebook friends – pays to be unpopular
All those people who have Facebook friends numbering in the thousands should maybe get a grip and realize they’re kidding themselves as to how popular they are. New research shows that the human brain can only cope with a maximum of 150 friends, in real life or on the Web, so it sometimes pays to be unpopular.
I suspect most of us have multiple social networking accounts. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, or any one of the countless other smaller, more niche sites, many of us belong to one or more of them. I also suspect that most of us have hundreds of friends on these sites, even though we hardly know any of them.
That’s because social networks are unlike real life in that they exist to offer connections between people, real or imagined. I, for instance, have very few friends in real life, and only a handful I’d class as close or intimate. The rest are merely friends of friends, acquaintances, or people I met once in a pub and now say hello to every time I pass them on the street.
On Facebook, this is even more apparent. I have close to 100 friends on Facebook, and yet a quick headcount shows I’ve met less than 40 of these people in real life; 20 of which are family members, with the other 20 being friends. The rest are online friends and work colleagues, who probably wouldn’t even recognize me were I to bump into them.
According to The Times, Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has studied social networking sites and concluded that they are still subject to ‘Dunbar’s Number’, a theory he developed in the 1990s which suggests our neocortex can only manage a social circle of 150 people or less. He explained:
The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world. People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.
There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.
So, Mr. and Mrs. Popular on Facebook, there’s no point in building up your friends list with nobodies you don’t really know but are just aware of slightly, as your brain isn’t capable of managing such a huge social circle. Instead, try mimicking real life and just stick to befriending those people you hold dear. Let the Facebook cull begin!
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January 25th, 2010
wahaha being unpopular has never been a problem for me…