I recently read an interesting book about adult friendships by Robin Dunbar: “Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationship”. This article describes an interview with Dunbar: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/robin-dunbar-explains-circles-friendship-dunbars-number/618931/
Dunbar’s Number
Dunbar is famous for the “Dunbar’s number” of about 150 (actually ranging from 100 to 250), which is the number of stable relationships people are able to maintain at once. That’s how big the villages and small communities were in the past, and how many Facebook friends we could actually keep track of more closely.
The Dunbar’s number is represented in a series of concentric circles. “The innermost layer of 1.5 is the most intimate; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of five is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous five, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. They also provide the main circle for exchange of child care. We trust them enough to leave our children with them. The next layer up, at 50, is your big-weekend-barbecue people. And the 150 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event.”
The number of friends we have stabilizes by our 30s, when many people start having children, “because babies are the killer for any kind of social life for everyone”, and “decline into old age — mainly by virtue of progressively losing the outermost layers. It ends up, if you live long enough, with just the innermost layer of 1.5.”
Thirty-Minute Rule
“The layers come about primarily because the time we have for social interaction is not infinite. You have to decide how to invest that time, bearing in mind that the strength of relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.” Another component of time is the physical distance between friends.
In the book, Dunbar says: “There is an unwritten law in the study of social networks known as the ‘Thirty-Minute Rule’: you will make the effort to see someone, and view them as important to you, if they live within thirty minutes’ travel time of where you live. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether this is thirty minutes on foot, by bicycle or by car. It’s the psychological significance of the time it takes you to get there. That being so, you might suppose that you would be more inclined to phone or text those who live beyond the thirty-minute limit to make up for the fact that you can’t get round to see them in person. In fact, it seems that you don’t.”
Seven Pillars of Friendship
Dunbar talks about how we choose our friends using the concept of seven pillars, or “seven dimensions of who you are that form the basis of friendship through homophily, which is the tendency for like to associate with like. ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’ Our friends are very similar to us.” The seven pillars are all substitutable —each is as good as any other, and the selection process is intuitive:
• Having the same language (or dialect);
• Growing up in the same location;
• Having had the same educational and career experiences;
• Having the same hobbies and interests;
• Having the same world view (an amalgam of moral views, religious views, and political views);
• Having the same sense of humor; and
• Having the same musical tastes.
“It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend.”
Dinner Party Size
According to Dunbar, if there are 4 people at a dinner party, there will be one conversation most of the time, but as soon as there is a fifth person, there will be two conversations going at once. A dinner party of 6 brings in more choices of conversation topics. “The picture is the same everywhere: few conversations that involve more than four people last for any length of time.”
“The limit of four for a conversation is a remarkably robust effect. If a fifth person joins, it will split into two separate conversations within as little as half a minute. In one of our studies, we sampled the size of the social group in which a conversation was embedded – in effect, the number of people sitting around the table at the pub – as well as the number of people actually engaged in each separate conversation. What these data show is that social groups fragment into another conversation every time their size hits a multiple of four. Up to four people, it will likely be a single conversation. Five or more and it will be two conversations, more than eight and it will be three, more than twelve and it will be four. ”
Differences in Friendship Activities: Women and Men
In his book, Dunbar says: “For the girls, the activity that had most effect in preserving a friendship was talking together, whether in person or by phone. For the boys, talking together had absolutely no effect at all – and I mean no effect at all – on how likely the friendship was to survive. What made the difference for the boys was making the effort to ‘do stuff’ together more often than they had done before – going to the pub, playing five-a-side football, climbing mountains, or whatever it was that they used to do.”
Making and Keeping Friends
Separately, another article discussed how to make and keep friends as an adult, based on a new book by Dr. Franco: “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/well/live/how-to-make-friends-adult.html
Dr. Franco says: “making friends in adulthood does not always feel so simple or easy, and that may be one reason why friendship is in decline. In 1990, only 3 percent of Americans said they had no close friends; in 2021, nearly 12 percent said the same. The United States is in the grips of a loneliness crisis that predates the Covid pandemic.”
According to Dr. Franco, friendships rarely happen organically, instead, we have to be intentional and try to put ourselves out there, leading with an assumption that other people will like us. “… the quality people most appreciate in a friend is ego support, which is basically someone who makes them feel like they matter. The more you can show people that you like and value them, the better. Research shows that just texting a friend can be more meaningful than people tend to think.”
How Therapy With Elaine Korngold Can Help
I integrate Brainspotting therapy with IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy to help clients identify and clarify what blocks them from moving forward in their lives, to process many feelings that arise when meeting new people, or resolve struggles in maintaining relationships and friendships.