Social relations can can be modeled as a hierarchy of intimacy. Among much larger sets of contacts or acquaintances, most persons maintain only a small number of close friends. A recent analysis of Facebook data found:
although the average Facebook user has 130 friends, they only communicate directly with four of those people in any given week. Direct communication includes likes and comments on their posts, posts on their wall, chat conversations, video calls, and private messages.
People I talk to are always surprised at how low the number is – only four people per week, and only six people per month. What’s more, the majority of people in these small groups remains consistent from week to week – for example, our partner, our closest friends and family.
Facebook data also show considerable skew in the number of friends. Consider Facebook users who have been on Facebook at least 6 months and have logged in at least 80% of days during the past 6 months. Among those Facebook users, consider the number with whom a given user has “reciprocally exchanged communication explicitly directed towards alter at least twice in a month.” The median number of these close friends for a given user is 3, but the mean number is 6.3. Those figures indicates considerable skew in the distribution of the number of close friends. In fact, 25% have eight such close friends, 10% have 17, and 5% have over 25. The volume of communication with these close friends also has considerable skew: the median number of communications per close friend per month is 19, while the mean is 60.2.[*] Similar skew occurs across every level of friend intimacy.
Heterogeneity in social capabilities and differences in friendship investments spread the friend-count distribution. Some persons are better at socializing than others, either through natural or technological advantages. These capability differences support differences in friend counts across persons. But another possibility is differential investment in communication. Text messaging has surpassed voice calls in part because text message requires less relational effort than real-time voice calls. Marking a “like” on a friend’s post requires much less relational effort than comforting a grieving friend. Those with more friends may be less invested per friend, even with a similar volume of direct communication per friend.
Understanding the economics of social relations is important for understanding communication industry developments. Identifying within the friend-count distribution spread the different effects of communication-capability heterogeneity and differential per-friend investment would contribute to that understanding.
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Read more:
- large-group sociality evolutionarily prior to family
- social-network effects in antiquity
- social possibilities across thousands and millions of years
Data:
skew in friends and communication by level of closeness (Excel version). For a model of levels of relational closeness, see Sutcliffe, Alistair, Dunbar, Robin, Binder, Jens and Arrow, Holly (2012), “Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives.” British Journal of Psychology, 103: 149–168. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02061.x
Notes:
[*] Pp. 170-1 in Kraut, Robert E. and Rosenn, Itamar (2012), “Comment on relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives.” British Journal of Psychology, 103: 169–173. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02074.x