Facebook Sociology

Okay, so Facebook makes you more social, right?

Actually, according to a recent article published in The Economist, that might not actually be the case. You see, sociologist have, for quite awhile, thought that there is a limit to the number of people that can form a meaningful social group:

Several years ago...Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

You see, while many Facebook users make it a (very annoying) habit of responding yes to every friend request that they get, the average number of friends across all users is relatively small, and the number of "friends" that an average user will actually interact with is even smaller:

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

So, surpirisingly, while Facebook might allow you to connect with (and broadcast your life to) an excessively large number of people, the social "norms" that humanity has established seem to be holding steady. From the dawn of our species to the explosion of cyberspace, humans have remained...well...human.