Any of these circles can include family members — because sometimes they're the friends with whom we happen to share DNA. Our romantic partners get their own bonus category. They're our most important allies in the pursuit of things like happiness, self-esteem and wellbeing.
Research by an academic called Susan Degges-White found that people with three to five close friends report the highest levels of life satisfaction. People who are pleased and comfortable with the number of friends they have, no matter what number that was, also reported high life satisfaction.
The study suggests we benefit from "feeling a sense of belonging within one's social network" and, really, that could be achieved with any number of buddies.
The ideal number is three to five, but it's of course possible to have fewer than that or more and be living your best life. I love all this evolutionary psychology stuff, but I also hesitate to prescribe an exact number of friends for every wildly unique person to have in order to be happy.
Summer has also stopped accumulating new friends because life and age tend to make us more discerning about who we have in our lives. This is extremely common — one study followed people over a year period to evaluate their psychological wellbeing in relation to their social network.
It found that we are happiest later in life if we prioritised the quantity of friends in our 20s but focused on the quality of our friendships in our 30s and beyond. So our future selves benefit from the vigorous socialising we tend to do in our first decade as an adult, as well as a more discerning approach as we get older. Andre Rangiah, also in his early 30s, agrees that as he gets older he's more comfortable having fewer friends, but wants to stay open to meeting new people. On the other hand, friends might seem small when you consider the friendships you might maintain via social media.
But, as Dr Dunbar pointed out, the friends that fall into the number are ones with who you share personal history, not those you merely exchange small talk with. Although, Dr Dunbar does point to social media as a means to keep friendships going that might have sooner drifted away from you for a myriad of reasons.
Yes, I can find out what you had for breakfast from your tweet, but can I really get to know you better? Within this number known officially as the Dunbar number , you begin to see smaller groups. The next step down is a circle of 15 — the friends you confide in and spend a lot of time with. The final circle is five and these are your best friends.
You can meet friends in the most bizarre circumstances - check out the women who became friends with the girls that stole their boyfriends. Do you ever ditch YOUR friends for your dog? Turns out, it's more common than you think. The innermost layer of 1. 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 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event. 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.
Han: Although the average size of each layer is more or less fixed, some factors cause slight variations. For example, when researchers looked at a sample of Dutch students, they found that extroverts have more friends in every layer than introverts do. Dunbar: Introverts seem to be risk averse. They prefer to have fewer friends so they can invest more time in each. Extroverts are more socially confident, so they prefer to have more friends at the expense of investing less time in each.
They probably feel they can wing it with someone else if one friend says no [to something]. These are just two equally good ways of solving the same problem. Han: How do these numbers fluctuate as you get older and circumstances change?
0コメント