BRITISH SCIENCE FESTIVAL:IF YOU fall in love, expect to lose some friends. You can only maintain about five very close friendships, but two will be displaced by your new love interest, according to research into how men and women use social media such as Facebook.
Both genders expect something completely different from social media, according to Prof Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford. “We only discovered the sex differences by accident,” he said yesterday at the British Science Festival in Birmingham.
He and his team have been studying these differences over the past two years and yesterday released some of the findings. They initially looked at social media used by women, but it immediately became apparent that women wanted something completely different from the technology than men.
“Men and women seem to use completely different mechanisms to maintain relationships,” Prof Dunbar said.
“For girls it is talking together. For boys it is doing things together. For girls the technology is perfectly designed for what they want to do, networking.” This predisposes men and women to use mobiles and social media differently, he added. Use of social networking also has a strong numbers element to it.
Some Facebook users claim to have up to 1,000 “friends” but this was an unrealistic view, according to Prof Dunbar.
Your actual circle of friends was much smaller and could not physically exceed a maximum of 150 due to a limit set by the brain, he said. This figure has become known as “Dunbar’s number”.
He said, however, that while social networking lets people stay in touch, only direct person-to-person contact cements friendships. “Facebook helps you keep in contact with people, but it doesn’t help you maintain relationships,” Prof Dunbar said. Friendship tended to disintegrate if you don’t maintain direct contact with people.
Yet we maintain only a tiny handful of genuine friendships and these occur in layers, he suggested. There is the core group of about five, those you would see every week and go to if you had problems.
The next layer of 12-15 are good friends you would see at least monthly and whose death you would find upsetting.
“Quite literally we have only just discovered that,” Prof Dunbar said.
But with a close-friend limit of five, something has to give if you become romantically attached. “If you go into a romantic relationship you lose two friends,” he said. Your new love knocks out one and typically causes a second to fall out of the core group.
“Your attention is so wholly focused on the new partner you don’t have time to see the others.”