Study: Humans Only Able To Maintain Five Relationships In Their Inner-Circle, 150 In Outer-Circle

A professor of evolutionary psychology says human beings cannot maintain more than 150 friendships — or five close friendships — at any given time, and claims he has proven it using phone call data sets in his new study.

Robin Dunbar came up with his theory of Dunbar’s Numbers in the early 1990s. The idea is that humans cannot have more than 150 friends due to limitations of brain size, attention span, and the amount of time to nurture close friendships.

Now, Dunbar says he has proven his theory using data from the phone records of almost 35 million users and six billion calls. According to his study, released in April, despite having greater access to each other and more social media contacts, people communicate with those in their inner-circle — on average, four people — at a greater frequency than those who better fit the description of acquaintance.

The study used algorithms to group calls based on Dunbar’s hypothesis and found there was “strong evidence for the existence of a layered structure” between call frequency and how strong the relationship was.

In other words, the frequency of communication lessens the more friends a person has. The study also states, although someone may have hundreds of friends, they would only rely on a select few in times of crisis.

“The social brain hypothesis predicts that humans have an average of about 150 relationships at any given time,” the study states. “Within this 150, there are layers of friends of an ego, where the number of friends in a layer increases as the emotional closeness decreases.”

In an era of social media, therefore, more friends and followers does not translate to close real-world bonds, according to Dunbar. Regardless of the number of friends and acquaintances, Dunbar says the study proves that layers of contact and closeness still exist.
Courtesy National Post