I spend a lot of my time convinced that everyone in the entire world has more friends than me. Ironically, so do a lot of my friends which suggests that we probably all just need to chill TFO.
A new study by anthropologist Robin Dunbar and researchers at Oxford University is going to make you feel slightly better about it though, because it turns out that most people have roughly the same number of close friends: five.
Dunbar has done a lot of research into relationships and in the 1990s he noticed a correlation between the size of a primate’s brain and their social groups: the bigger the brain, the larger the social group. Which he explained quite simply: that a bigger brain can remember more peers, and therefore have better interactions with them and keeping the larger social group going.
Once he'd discovered this, he applied the concept to humans and found that they can't have more than 150 people in their social sphere. On top of this, he recognised there was differences in the emotional closeness of these relationships and these were to do with ‘layering’ (these are called 'Dunbar Layers'). Generally people have the same layers: five people in their closest layer, 10 in the next, then 35 and the final layer has 100.
Now in this latest study, the theory has been taken further using data from six billion mobile phone calls made by 35 million people in an unnamed European country throughout 2007.
They were able to screen out people who did not use their phones regularly and who only made reciprocated calls, leaving 27,000 people who, on average, call 130 people which makes 3,500 calls per year and about 10 a day. From this they found proof of the Dunbar layers: that the average cumulative layer is 4.1, 11.0, 29.8, with a total of 128.9. They also identified that some people had an extra layer, which, they theorised, could be accounted for in the difference between introverts and extroverts.
So, don't feel bad when you think you only have four or five best friends because it's basically the same for everyone. Science says so.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.