How many friendships can you maintain

Robert Dumbar has conducted a lot of the research we have right now on the subject of friendship. He's the man behind the Dumbar Number Theory , which suggests that the average person can have up to friendships in real life — although it's also a lower number than both the average and median number of friends Facebook users have online. Dumbar's research was also the basis for the recent discovery that the average human can have five best friend relationships at the same time, and that's what we're talking about right now.

Here's the deal. In the early s, Dumbar discovered a correlation between the size of a primate's brain and the size of their social group : In layperson's terms, the bigger the brain the primate had, the more friends the primate had. For people, this means that the size of our neocortex basically dictates how many close friendships we're able to maintain at once. Recently, Dumbar and his fellow researchers decided to dig into people's phone records to determine the closeness of their relationship based on the frequency with which they spoke on the phone.

Because we're all text-obsessed now, they used records from , when most people still talked on the phone. Each layer is consistent with contact — better friends require more contact or they turn into acquaintances. Experts say having shallow relationships can lead to loneliness, which could lead to an increased risk of death. You can also feel stress for having too many obligations — which is another reason to keep your clique small.

So despite racking up hundreds of friends on social media, all you need in your inner circle are five loyal pals. Happening Now. Sam Koukoulas. Science says you should have five friends in your life. Dunbar pointed to historical and modern-day examples to back up his research. Around B. In , the average size of most English villages recorded in the Domesday Book was people. In modern armies, fighting units contain an average of to people, he said.

In , when the Swedish tax agency was restructuring, a strategist for the agency proposed that each of the new offices have about to employees, citing Dr.

Employees, already unhappy with the restructuring, got wind of the plan and complained about being compared to monkeys. While it may be comforting to think that there is an optimal number of people with whom we should surround ourselves, in reality there is not one rule that applies to all of us, said Louise Barrett, a psychology professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada.

Barrett, a biological anthropologist who was not involved in the new study and who previously studied under Dr. Dunbar, said the analysis looked robust. The debate over relationships comes as people are rethinking which friendships they want to recultivate after the pandemic shrank social circles and as businesses are designing post-pandemic work spaces.