Study Shows That Having Over 150 FB Friends Affects Real-Life Friendships

In this digital day and age, social media is an integral part of our life.

Do you catch yourself jumping from one app to another, and then back again?

It has become a repetitive mundane cycle.

Facebook. Take a look at your friend list.

How many of them do you actually know in person?

And how many do you actually keep in touch with?

Even better, how many of them do you actually meet up with?

Are your answers dwindling in value?

According to an article by Bigthink, the average Facebook user now has about 338 friends and the median is 200.

I think it is safe to say, that our Facebook friend is definitely above average, which consists of our schoolmates, colleagues and relatives.

It is impossible to have a substantial relationship with every single one.

Oxford University anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, mentions that any grouping larger than 150 starts to put a strain on the cognitive capacity of the human brain a.k.a the Dunbar’s Number.

So anything above 150, you wouldn’t be able to maintain a stable relationship.

It doesn’t seem that it might cause serious effects now, but think about it.

If you keep stuffing your Facebook with more and more people (the limit is 5000, just so you know), wouldn’t you be overloaded with all kinds of information from various people?

Facebook is essentially a social app that helps you keep in touch with your friends (though it is a very passive way of maintaining a friendship), but if your feed gets overloaded with so many posts from various people, the purpose kind of disappears.

Maria Konnikova, a writer from the New Yorker, uses the Dunbar’s Number theory to show the possible negative effects of having too many friends.

If a person’s limit is 150 friends (the ones where you form a meaningful relationship with), that limit gets stretched out even further through superficial online friends that we don’t meet in person.

It makes sense when you really think about it.

It does make sense when you start investing time and energy with people you probably won’t meet up with in person, you wouldn’t have that many resources left to actually sustain real-life friendships, and the line may start to get blurry.

I am not asking you to go on a social media spring cleaning, but there is a price to pay for being a social (media) butterfly.

Food for thought? I think so too.