numbers

When I periodically check out the most popular searches on this blog (yes, I am addicted to Google Analytics), many of them have to do with numbers.

Readers are always interested in how the numbers of their friendships stack up to those of others. There isn't too much new in the number world. And without a real friendship census, counting numbers of friends still remains a very imprecise 'science' because of the wide variability among the groups researchers study, the techniques they use, and the questions they ask.

[In case you can't see the small print: The Friendship Pyramid depicted above has three slices. At the apex are best friends, than close friends in the middle, and casual ones at the base. Generally, women tend to have more friends of that type as they go from top to bottom.]

Friendship numerology: More art than science

Some of the soft conclusions we can draw about numbers from friendship research include:

• People have only a small circle of best friends relative to close ones and casual ones (as illustrated in the pyramid).

• While there is wide variability, most women have between 2 and 5 very close or best friends. 

• As a group, women tend to favor a smaller, more intimate circle of friends than men.

• An upper limit of the number of friends someone can maintain at once is called "Dunbar's number." British anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar has conducted research that concludes that humans are functionally hard-wired to handle a maximum of 150 friends at a time.

• An MSN Messenger study conducted in the UK, still one of the most comprehensive studies of the friendship patterns, surveyed 10,000 people, both male and female. The study found that Brits collect an average of 196 friends over a lifetime. They only keep one out of 12 of them.

• Ironically, the same survey reported that we tend to see social friends (AKA casual ones) more often than close ones. For example, the survey ound that women see their social friends every 3.5 days while they see their close friends only six times a year.

If you find this interesting, you may want to read some of my 'numerous' older posts related to numbers.

How many friends does it take?

When it comes to friendship who's counting?

Online friending and defriending patterns

Friends in the digital playground

When it comes to friendships, it’s not how long or how close or how good. Instead, the latest craze seems to be how many. No one is quite sure how many friends you need or how many you can have. Given the number vacuum, some members of social networking sites like Facebook, My Space, or LinkedIn are accreting new friends like young boys collects baseball cards---acquiring impressive numbers of online “friends” that approach the hundreds and thousands.

Such excess raises the question---How many friendships, real, virtual or a combination of the two---can any one person reasonably handle? It depends on who you are and what it means for you to befriend someone. Are your friendships casual or close? Are they intense or intermittent? Are they brief or long-standing?

Every woman I know has a finite amount of time for friendship (which varies based on how she chooses to balance her social needs with the rest of her life). Additionally, some women are naturally more adept than others in both making friends and keeping them.

British anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar has conducted research that concludes that humans are functionally hard-wired to handle a maximum of 150 friends at a time. That number, 150, has been dubbed Dunbar’s Number. The term was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point and has been cited recently in a spate of news articles.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Carl Bialik (AKA the Numbers Guy) suggests that technology may actually enable us to expand the number of friends we can juggle simultaneously. He points out that social networking sites can help us maintain contact with people who are at the outer fringes of our circle of friends. Cell phones, emails, and IMs have similarly expanded our capability to reach out and touch someone.

“Prof. Dunbar isn't sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated,” writes Bialik. “The research, he says, ‘made us realize people don't know what these wretched things called relationships are -- and that helps explain why we're so bad at them.’”