A new study claims that most of your Facebook friends don’t care about you and would not even feel sympathy for you.
Although you might count hundreds of friends on Facebook, the truth is that an average of only four of them can really be depended upon.
Professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, Robin Dunbar, wanted to find out if the number of Facebook friends people had was related to the number of their real friends.
His study analysed 3,375 male and female participants between the ages of 18 and 65.
Participants were asked how many “real” friends they had, and an average of 27.6% of their social network was reported as being “real”. When asked how many would be around to provide support during a crisis though, the number dropped to just four people.
Professor Dunbar found that there was very little correlation between the number of friends one had on social networks and the number of friends one could depend on or even talk to regularly.
He said, “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 simply because most social-media sites do not allow one to differentiate between these layers.”
The average Facebook user in the study had about 150 Facebook friends, but Dunbar believes that people can only maintain about 5 close relationships due to constraints of the human mind- people must meet face-to-face rather than face-to-Facebook to maintain their friendships.
“There is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcome,” claims the study. “In practical terms, it may reflect the fact that real (as opposed to casual) relationships require at least occasional face-to-face interaction to maintain them.”
This is not to say that social networks do not have any use; they can help slow down the “decay rate” of friendships that comes from lack of contact.
“Friendships, in particular, have a natural decay rate in the absence of contact, and social media may well function to slow down the rate of decay,” Dunbar wrote. “However, that alone may not be sufficient to prevent friendships eventually dying naturally if they are not occasionally reinforced by face-to-face interaction.”
Sources: The Independent, Newsweek, Yahoo News
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It really shouldn’t have to take a study to figure this out! Just because the term used by FB is ‘friends’ instead of ‘contacts who happen to be connected to other contacts merely related over non-personal issues mutual people may happen to find they sometimes agree with’…certainly does not mean they are true “friends”. Pretty silly.