Can Facebook take you beyond the number of Dunbar? – Proexpansión Peru

If you spend a certain amount of time on Facebook you will have been noticed that there is an inordinate number of people with 500 friends or more. This usually occurs more frequently in the younger generation who are more familiar with new technologies. The question we ask is how many touches of these people one can truly call a friend?

While conducting a study to find out why primates spend much of their time to the toilet, an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Oxford, Robin Dunbar found in the eighties and decided to investigate the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. This suggests that primates have larger brains because they live in socially complex societies. The larger the group the shapes, the bigger the brain.

This led him to wonder and take on the challenge of discovering how many individuals enables us to process our brain. After making calculations, it turned out that the average person could have a maximum of 150 people in your social circle. This number is called the Dunbar number.

In fact, the number of Dunbar is a series of numbers, 150 being the best known. This is the number of friends a person can have. Five of these people belong to a group of close friends, 15 in a group with which we sympathize and trust, 50 close friends, casual friends 150 and about 500 known. Dunbar all studies suggest that a person can recognize faces 1500 at most. Of course, these numbers do not apply equally to everyone.

Recently, this anthropologist and psychologist completed a new research, which was recently published in the Royal Society with social media title Do online That Cut Through the constraints limit the size of offline social networks? In this, Dunbar asked whether Facebook and other social networks could break this number and ensure that we have the capacity to process more real friends. The answer, unfortunately, is no.

The point is that while amicales circles in Facebook can become very large, this network does not group people by the standards of Dunbar, you’re just known someone or not. However, it rescues that although this network can not help you get more real friends, can help you keep friends or acquaintances that of not having contacted by that means, no longer be reported.

Maybe as an experiment, we should get us to our accounts and our friends overcome by this method. Who knows what we would find.