Why You Can Only Handle a Maximum of 150 Friends

How many friends can you handle? Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, says people can only cognitively deal with a maximum of 150 friends. More than that number and our brains can't handle it. This translates to behavior where we will not draw close relationships or remember enough details about a person to keep a friendship going. If we keep it under 150 friendships, we can have a variety of fulfilling relationships with people, feel connected, schedule time together, and do it all without being overwhelmed.

In a 2012 Op-Ed column in the New York Times, Dunbar said that sites like Facebook "may have allowed us to amass thousands of 'friends,' but they have not yet devised a way to cut through the clunky, old-fashioned nature of relationships themselves. Our circle of actual friends remains stubbornly small, limited not by technology but by human nature."

Definition of The Dunbar Number

Dunbar's ideal number of friends (often called "The Dunbar Number") is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom any individual is able to sustain a stable or meaningful social relationship (usually considered to be roughly 150)" and gives the origin of this concept as, "early 21st century: named after Robin Dunbar (b. 1947), the British anthropologist and psychologist who proposed the theory in the 1990s."

While "The Dunbar Number" is decades old, it has recently received new attention due to the number of friends people have in social media, namely Facebook. There are those that argue that people can handle more than 150 friends, especially if they are online friends only.

But Dunbar refutes this argument, saying in the Times Op-Ed piece, "contrary to all the hype and hope, the people in our electronic social worlds are, for most of us, the same people in our offline social worlds. In fact, the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 to 130, just short enough of Dunbar’s number to allow room for grandparents and babies, people too old or too young to have acquired the digital habit."

Dunbar Research on Friendship

Dunbar did extensive research on this subject in order to arrive at the number 150. One of the more famous studies he did was with anthropologist Russell Hill. A 2013 Businessweek article noted that the pair studied holiday cards sent by people and found that on average, "about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues." The total of these figures added up to just over 150.

This number had significance for Dunbar. He noticed groups of 150 people in places like the military, in churches, and companies. The company Gore-Tex, for example, builds a new plant every time the number of people working at one goes over 150. They have found that employees relate to each other better and work as more of a unified group when they're kept under this number.

Friends at Work and School

What about the different levels of friendship? You can have friends who are just acquaintances, or those at work or school.

Dunbar says that in small companies, your colleagues more naturally become your friends. However, if you work for a large organization, you are probably not going to hang out with the folks you work with after hours. Instead of grabbing a drink or joining a sports league together, you'll just go home. As a result, your friends will largely be outside of your working environment.

150 Means a Variety of Close Friends and Acquaintances

Not every friendship you have is going to be the same. What's more, that's a good thing. A 2012 article by Russell C. Smith and Michael Foster claims that your acquaintances, or those on the fringe level of your social circle, will be extremely helpful to you in ways, even more than your BFFs.

You'll likely learn about "your next job, new apartment, or cultural or social opportunities from a loose connection -- an informed and significantly connected person, who's several connections removed -- than from your closest connections."

In other words, it pays to nurture all your friendships, even the ones where you can't sit over a cup of coffee and talk about life for hours on end. Not every person in your life needs to be a best friend, but that's alright, because according to Dunbar's number, you wouldn't be able to handle more than 150 of them anyway.

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