How many friends does a person need?
This is a question I was discussing with one of my co-workers the other day. She said she had lots of close friends and estimated the number to be around 200. I thought that was a rather large number of friends and didn't really understand how she could interact with that many people on a consistent basis.
The conversation peaked my curiosity so I started doing some research on the number of friends a human being needs to be happy. I came across some research done in the 1990s by Oxford University Anthropologist Dr. Robin Dunbar. Dunbar's research concluded that humans can maintain relationships with only 150 people, due to the size of our brain's neocortex.
So, in a nutshell, our brains can't handle dealing with any more than 150 people on a personal level. But still, that seems like a whole lot of people to call friends. Maybe my brain is abnormal but I wanted to look into the research further.
As I dug deeper I found that Dunbar considers the following relationships as part of the 150; family, friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Now we are starting to get somewhere. I have a lot of family but I can honestly say that I would count less than five of them as friends. I would bet that if you took a survey of people and asked them if they would consider family members as friends I think you would find percentages similar to mine.
Like the famous author Harper Lee said, "You can choose your friends but you sure can't choose your family."
In 2016, Dunbar floated out a new concept on friendship called "Dunbar's Layers" -- a biological and sociological model which took into account the closeness of each relationship. These layers are based on how emotionally close you can be with an individual that you call a friend. Dunbar states individuals generally have up to five people in the closest layer. The next closest layer contains an additional 10, the one beyond that an extra 35, and the final group another 100. All tolled these groups make up the 150 friends that our brains can hold.
OK, now this theory is beginning to make sense to me. Dunbar says that we really only have about five close personal friends and the rest are some variation of an acquaintance.
But I wonder how do dogs play into this equation? I mean a dog is man's best friend, isn't he? So using the Dunbar Layers if somebody owns three dogs then their brain will only allow them to be very close to two people.
Do cats count?
How about birds, fish, hamsters or horses?
Oh no, this is getting tough. I hope I don't get anyone into trouble with my last question but I have to ask.
What if your spouse owns five pets?
Editorial on 10/21/2018