No New Friends

How many deep and devout connections do you have? I am not talking about soft connections or Facebook friends – I am talking about people you would not feel uncomfortable picking up from the airport: maintained and cultivated relationships. If you are as connected as I am through social media/technology, you would probably gander that the number is relatively high; it is not - it actually cognitively can’t be.

GORE-TEX: you may recognize it as the company that makes hiking boots, wet suits, ponchos and other weather resistant products. Oddly enough, this company is the subject of a popular narrative in the world of sociology. The company had humble beginnings like most start-ups. The founder, Bill Gore, literally set the company up in his basement. GORE-TEX was operated this way for many years until the Denver Water Company ordered seven and a half miles of their specialized waterproof, breathable material; this forced the founder to expand manufacturing capacity. The company continued to expand until one day Gore walked into his factory and “simply didn’t know who everybody was.” The founder recognized that the bigger the company was the less concerned the employees were with helping out each other, and helping out the company. Salesmen did not know the manufacturing team which created a lapse in product repairs and all around customer service.

Gore decided to cap his factories at 150 employees. This was guaranteed by the number of parking spaces he built outside new factories; when there were not enough parking spaces anymore, it was time to build a new factory.

“Dunbar’s Number” is the suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain social relationships. This number was first postulated by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. His theory was that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size. The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”

What is Dunbar’s hypothesized limit? It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.

*Pictured above: Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist pioneering research on human social behavior

 

 

*Pictured above: Drake, a man who clearly understands the cognitive restraints surrounding social relationships as elucidated by his verse in the song No New Friends.

Social media certainly enables relationships; this can be said with absolute certainty. But does it: A) replace existing relationships B) prevent additional relationships from forming or C) actually not build relationships at all?

We devote approximately 40% of our limited social time each week to just five individuals, often the most important people we know. Historically this number has been limited to five due to proximity issues and time restraints. Social media claims to have the answer. There is virtually no cap on how many internet “friends” you can have. If the world felt so inclined literally every person on the planet could read the words I am typing right now as the connectivity potential is innumerable.

Your great-grandparents knew the same people their entire lives. People did not move around like we do today, collecting pockets of friends everywhere we go; often we enter regionally fragmented friend groups without even leaving our couch via technology.

Having more technology does not make your neocortex bigger.

When asked if tools such as Facebook and Twitter have changed our capacity to handle social connections Dunbar stated:

“Apparently not at all; it is important to remember that the 150 is just one layer in a series of layers of acquaintanceship within which we sit. Beyond the 150 are at least two further layers (one at 500 and one at 1,500), which correspond to acquaintances (people we have a nodding acquaintance with) and faces we recognize.

All that seems to be happening when people add more than 150 friends on Facebook is that they simply dip into these normal higher layers. If you like, Facebook has muddied the waters by calling them all friends, but really they are not.

This isn’t to say that social-networking services don’t serve a useful function in facilitating our interactions with our “friends,” but what they don’t seem to do is allow us to increase the number of true friends.”

It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the potential for connections via social media/technology platforms, and it is true that much can be gained by leveraging these connections. However, it may be advantageous to keep the old saying “quality over quantity” in mind because unfortunately, our ability to maintain relationships is cognitively limited.

-Luke