How many people do you have in your social network

How many people do you have in your social network - your real social network?

How many people do you have in your social network – not social media network, but your social network with real people? This includes acquaintances that you have personal exchanges with. What is the average number of acquaintances for each person?

The Psychological Association takes a look at the research documented in FiveThirtyEight (September 23, 2015) – on how many acquaintances, on average, a person actually has in their social network.

Research on acquaintances commenced in the 1950s in a study on ‘acquaintance volume.’ Two sociologists, Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen, pioneered the research on estimating the number of individuals people have in their social network. Pool carried a notebook for 100 days and recorded every exchange with another person (in person, over the telephone, and by mail). Each person was noted once even if he interacted many times with the same person. Therefore as the days passed, the number of new names added each day declined. Pool then predicted what would happen over 20 years – and estimated that he would have recorded about 3,500 acquaintances (that’s on average 175 people per year).

In 1960, an MIT student conducted an experiment that looked at 86 days of President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment diary and estimated that he would have about 22,500 acquaintances in 20 years (that’s on average 1,125 people per year).

In 1961, Michael Gurevich repeated the Pool and Kochen experiment, again with a notebook recording personal exchanges. Instead of just himself, he enlisted the help of 27 participants. Gurevich averaged the results and got 2,130 in a 20-year period (that’s on average 107 people per year).

In the 1990s Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology, initially studied apes and the size of their social group. Using a formula based on brain size, he chose the Macaca sinica monkeys and the Cacajao monkeys (their brain size is similar to the size of a human brain). The Macacas had a social group of around 17 whereas the Cacajao had a social group of around four monkey friends. His prediction for people was between 100 and 231 friends – with an average of 150.

Dunbar tested his theory by studying tribes: one between 30-50 people and the other between 500-2,500 people. Therefore clans within the tribes were estimated to be around 100-200 people. He defined clans as those that ‘interact on a sufficiently regular basis to have strong bonds based on direct personal knowledge.’ Dunbar also looked at military groupings and found that the average size was 179.7 (around 180). In 2002 he conducted an experiment on the average number of Christmas cards people sent to people they know or were acquainted with – and the average was 153.5 (around 150).

Hence Dunbar maintains that people, on average, have 150 acquaintances. He inferred that ‘there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain a stable relationship with.’ That is, around 150 people whose names and faces a person can remember without prompts.

Given each of these research studies, excluding the President Roosevelt study and the ape study, the results are quite similar – between 107-175 – on average 141. The 150 statistic is the average ballpark figure that most mathematicians use.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/how-many-people-can-you-remember.html

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-people-can-you-remember/

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