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MARIA KONNIKOVA

Maria Konnikova was born in Moscow, Russia, and emigrated

to the United States as a child. She studied psychology, creative
writing, and government at Harvard University before receiving
her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. Konnikova's
writing has appeared in popular publications such as the Atlan-
t? the New York Times, Slote, the New Republic, the Woll Street
Journol, Salon, and Scientific American, and she currently writes o Margaret Singer and Max
Freedman
a weekly column for the New Yorker online in which she focuses
on psychology and science.Her NewYork Iirnes best-selling book
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes was nominated for the Agatha Award and the
Anthony Award for Best Nonfiction.
"The Limits of Friendship" was published October Z 2014,in the online version of the Neraz
Yorker.The NewYorker, both in print and online, offers notable commentary on politics, global
affairs, art and popular culture, and science and technology. lt also publishes short fiction and
poetry and is famous for its cartoons. The October 7,2014, online edition also included articles
on Ebola, New York's High Line green space, and the role of the Web site Reddit in Spanish
politics.
ln this essay, Konnikova explores the Dunbar number, the theoretical number of friends
we can really have, and the ways in which social networking is affecting not only this number
but also socialization itself. Along with anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar, she
questions whether increasingly pervasive virtual interaction will influence the friend groups
and social skills of new generations. Asks Konnikova: "[W]hat happens if you're raised from a
young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones?" (p.239).
Are virtual friends replacing actual friends? How many friends do you feel you have?

TAGS community, culture, identity, medio, social media, psychology, relotionships, science
ond technology, soclal change
CONNECTIONS: Appiah, Duhigg, Epstein, Friedman, Pollon, Restok, Rosin

Questions for Critical Reading

1. As you read, mark passages where Konnikova defines the Dunbar number and the rule
of three. Then explain these terms in your own words, referencing specific passages
from Konnikova to supportyour response.

2. What do you think makes a good friend? List the qualities of close friendship. As you
read, consider the effect of social media on friendship.

3. What's the role of biology in social organization? Examine closely those places where
Konnikova draws from the research of Robin Dunbar and others. Does biology deter-
mine society?

235
 Maria Konnikova

The Limits of FriendshiP

Robin Dunbar came up with his eponymous number almost by accident. The Uni-
versity of Oxford anthropologist and psychologist (then at University College London)
was trying to solve the problem of why primates devote so much time and effort to
grooming. In the process of figuring out the solution, he chanced upon a potentially
far more intriguing application for his research. At the time, in the nineteen-eighties,
the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (now known as the Social Brain Hypoth-
esis) had just been introduced into anthropological and primatology discourse.l It held
that primates have large brains because they live in socially complex societies: the
larger the group, the larger the brain. Thus, from the size of an animal's neocortex,
the frontal lobe in particular, you could theoretically predict the group size for that
animal.
Looking at his grooming data, Dunbar made the mental leap to humans. "We also
had humans in our data set so it occurred to me to look to see what size group that re-
lationship might predict for humans," he told me recently. Dunbar did the math, using
a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came
up with a number.2 ]udging from the size of an average human brain, the number of
people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty'
Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing lev-
els. For the last twenty-two years, Dunbar has been "unpacking and exploring" what
that number actually means-and whether our ever-expanding social networks have
done anything to change it.
The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and
fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends-the people, say, you'd invite to a
large party. (In reality, it's a range: a hundred at the low end and two hundred for the
more social of us.) From there, through qualitative interviews coupled with analysis
of experimental and survey data, Dunbar discovered that the number grows and de-
creases according to a precise formula, roughly a "rule of three."3 The next step down,
fifty, is the number of people we call close friends-perhaps the people you'd invite
to a group dinner. You see them often, but not so much that you consider them to be
true intimates. Then there's the circle of fifteen: the friends that you can turn to for
sympathy when you need it, the ones you can confide in about most things. The most
intimate Dunbar number, five, is your close support group. These are your best friends
(and often family members). On the flipside, groups can extend to five hundred, the ac-
quaintance level, and to fifteen hundred, the absolute limit-the people for whom you
can put a name to a face. While the group sizes are relatively stable, their composition
L. fluid. Your five today may not be your five next week; people drift among layers
"u1
and sometimes fall out of them altogether.
When Dunbar consulted the anthropological and historical record, he found re-
markable consistency in support of his structure. The average group size among mod-
ern hunter-gatherer societies (where there was accurate census data) was 148.4
individuals. Company size in professional armies, Dunbar found, was also remarkably
close to a hundred and fifty, from the Roman Empire to sixteenth-century Spain to
the twentieth-century Soviet Union. Companies, in turn, tended to be broken down
into smaller units of around fifty then further divided into sections of between ten and
 The Limits of Friendship

fifteen. At the opposite end. the companies formed battalions that rangedfrom five
hundred and fifty to eight hundred, and even larger regiments.
Dunbar then decided to go beyond the existing evidence and into experimental
methods. In one early study, the first empirical demonstration of the Dunbar number
in action, he and the Durham University anthropologist Russell Hill examined the des-
tinations of Christmas cards sent from households all over the UK-a socially perva-
sive practice, Dunbar explained to me, carried out by most typical households.a Dunbar
and Hill had each household list its Christmas card recipients and rate them on several
scales. "When you looked at the pattern, there was a sense that there were distinct
subgroups in there,f'Dunbar said. If you considered the number of people in each send-
ing household and each recipient household, each individual's network was composed
of about a hundred and fifty people. And within that network, people fell into circles
of relative closeness-family, friends, neighbors, and work colleagues. Those circles
conformed to Dunbar's breakdown.
As constant use of social media has become the new normal, however, people
have started challenging the continued relevance of Dunbar's number: Isn't it easier
to have more friends when we have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to help us to
cultivate and maintain them? Some, like the University of California, Berheley, profes-
sor Morten Hansen, have pointed out that social media has facilitated more effective
collaborations. Our real-world friends tend to know the same people that we do, but,
in the online world, we can expand our networks strategically, leading to better busi-
ness outcomes. Yet. when researchers tried to determine whether virtual networks
increase our strong ties as well as our weak ones (the ones that Hansen had focused
on), they found that, for now, the essential Dunbar number, a hundred and fifty, has
remained constant. When Bruno Gonqalves and his colleagues at Indiana University
at Bloomington looked at whether Twitter had changed the number of relationships
that users could maintain over a six-month period, they found that, despite the relative
ease of Twitter connections as opposed to face-to-face ones, the individuals that they
followed could only manage between one and two hundred stable connections. When
the Michigan State University researcher Nicole Ellison surveyed a random sample of
undergraduates about their Facebook use, she found, that while their median number
ofFacebook friends was three hundred, they only counted an average ofseventy-five
as actual friends.s
There's no question, Dunbar agrees, that networks like Facebook are changing the
nature of human interaction. "What Facebook does and why it's been so successful in
so many ways is it allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively
disappear," he said. But one of the things that keeps face-to-face friendships strong is
the nature of shared experience: you Iaugh together; you dance together; you gape
at the hot-dog eaters on Coney Island together.6 We do have a social-media equiva-
lent-sharing, liking, knowing that all of your friends have looked at the same cat
video on YouTube as you did-but it lacks the synchronicity of shared experienqe: It's
like a comedy that you watch by yourself: you won't laugh as loudly or as often, even if
you're fully aware that all your friends think it's hysterical. We've seen the same movie,
but we can't bond over it in the same way.
With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more
than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack
3I8,, Maria Konnikova

deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in

superficial relationships comes
at tlhe expense of more profound ones. we may widen our network to two, three, or
not acquaintances, but keeping up an
four hundred people thai we see as friends, iust
resources. "The amount of social capital you have is pretty
actual friendship requires
i'It involvds time investment. If you garner connections with more
fixed,,,Dunbar said.
more thinly so the
people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital
uu"tug" capital per person is lower"' If we're
of social capital
busy putting in the effort, however minimal, i "The amount
,,like" and comment and irrteract with an I you have is pretty fixed."
to
ever-widening network, we have less tiihe
split of attention:
and capacity left for our closer groups. Traditionally, it's a sixty-forty
groups fifty, fifteen, and five' and
we spend sixty per cent of our time with our core of
may be growing our base, and, in the
forty with the larger spheres. social networks
process, reversing that balance'
that vir-
on an even d"eeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship
surprise Dunbar, who discovered
tual connections can never replace. This wouidn't
among primates
his number when he was studying the social bonding that occurs
and his colleagues have been look-
through grooming. over the past few years, Dunbar
neurological and physiological
ing at the importince of touch in sparking the sort of
"we underestimate how im-
."rpo.rr", that, in turn, lead to bonding and friendship
light brush on the shoulder' a pat'
portant touch is in the social world," he said. With a
a deeper bond than through
t. u ,qo""r" of the arm or hand, we can communicate you, even casually'
speaking alone. "Words are easy. But the way someone touches
tells youmore about what they're thinking of you'"
Dunbar already knew that in monkeys grooming activated the endorphin
sys-
Dunbar and his colleagues
tem.7 Was the same true in humans? In a series of studies,
that, in turn' are
demonstrated that very light touch triggers a cascade of endorphins
measuring endorphin release
important for creating pe-rsonal relationships. Because
thp or PET scan' and the lat-
directly is invasive-f,& either need to perform a spinal
a

ter, though considered safe, involves injecting a person with a radioactive tracer-they
pain thresh-
first looked at endorphin release indirectly. In one study, they examined
water (in a lab), or how
olds: how lorrg . p".ron could keep her hand in a bucket
of ice
present (back against the wall'
Iong she could maintain a sitting position with no chair
your flooded with endor-
legs bent at a ninety degree u.rgl") i.t th" field.s when
body is
you could before, so pain tolerance
ptiirrr, you're able to wilhstand pain for longer than
used as a proxy for endorphin levels. The longer you can stand the pain' the
is often
found that a shared ex-
more endorptrins Lave Ueen released into your system. They
perience of laughter-a synchronous, face-to-face experience-prior
to immersion,
in natural setting
be it in the lab (watching a neutral or funny movie with others)
or a
enabled people to hold
(theatre performance, ui th. 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival)
longer than they d previ-
their hands in ice or maintain the chair position significantly
ously been able to.
how endorphins
Next, in an ongoing study, Dunbar and his colleagues loohed at
procedure that lets you look
were activated in tlie Urain airectty, through PET scans, a
saw the same
at how different.neural receptors uptake endorphins. The researchers
demonstrated with hu-
thing that happened with monkeys, and that had earlier been
 The Limits of Friendship 239

mans that were viewing positive emotional stimuli: when subjects in the scanner were
lightly touched, their bodies released endorphins.e "We were nervous we wouldn't find
anything because the touch was so light," Dunbar said. 'Astonishingly, we saw a phe-
nomenal response." In fact, this makes a great deal of sense and answers a lot of long-
standing questions about our sensory receptors, he explained. Our shin has a set of
neurons, common to all mammals, that respond to light stroking, but not to any other
kind of touch. Unlike other touch receptors, which operate on a Ioop-you touch a hot
stove, the nerves fire a signal to the brain, the brain registers pain and fires a signal
back for you to withdraw your hand-these receptors are one-way. They talk to the
brain, but the brain doesn't communicate back. "We think that's what they exist for, to
trigger endorphin responses as a consequence of grooming," Dunbar said. Until social
media can replicate that touch, it can't fully replicate social bonding.
But, the truth is, no one really knows how relevant the Dunbar number will re-
main in a world increasingly dominated by virtual interactions. The brain is incredibly
plastic, and, from past researchlo on social interaction, we hnow that early childhood
experience is crucial in developing those parts of the brain that are largely dedicated
to social interaction, empathy, and other interpersonal concerns.lr Deprive a child of
interaction and touch early on, and those areas won't develop fully. Envelop her in a
huge family or friend group, with plenty of holding and shared experience, and those
areas grow bigger. So what happens if you're raised from a young age to see virtual
interactions as akin to physical ones? "This is the big imponderable," Dunbar said. "We
haven't yet seen an entire generation that's grown up with things like Facebook go
through adulthood yet." Dunbar himself doesn't have a firm opinion one way or the
other about whether virtual social networks will prove wonderful for friendships or
ultimately diminish the number of satisfying interactions one has. "I don't think we
have enough evidence to argue either way," he said.
One concern, though, is that some social skills may not develop as effectively when
so many interactions exist online. We learn how we are and aren't supposed to act by
observing others and then having opportunities to act out our observations ourselves.
We aren't born with full social awareness, and Dunbar fears that too much virtual
interaction may subvert that education. "In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks
sand in your face, you can't get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, com-
promise," he said. "On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There's no
forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn." If you spend most of your time online,
you may not get enough in-person group experience to learn how to properly interact
on a large scale-a fear that, some early evidence suggests, may be materializing.l2
"It's quite conceivable that we might end up less social in the future, which would be a
disaster because we need to be more social-our world has become so large," Dunbar
said. The more our virtual friends replace our face-to-face ones, in fact, the more our
Dunbar number may shrink.

NOTES
1. MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, s.v. "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis," by
Andrew Whiten, http://ai.ato.ms/MITECS/Entry/whiten.html.
2. R. I. M. Dunbar, "Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Hu-
mans," B ehav ioral and. Brain S cienc e s 1 6 ( 1 9 9 3) : 681,-7 3 5.
 Maria Konnikova

3. W.-X. Zhou et al., "Discrete Hierarchical Organization of Social Group Sizes," Proceed-
272 (2OO5): 439-44'
ings of the Royal Society B
4. R. A.-Hilt and R. I. M. Dunbar, "social Network Size in Humans," Human Nature L4,
no. 1(2003): 53-72.
5. Nicole S. Eliison et al., "Connection Strategies: Social Capital Implications of Facebook-
Enabled communication Practices ," New Media society 13 (2011): 873-92.
- Curtis D. Hardin and Terri D. Conley, 'A inRelational
6. Approach to Cognition: Shared
Cognition," in Cognitive Social Psy-
Experience and Relationship Affirmation Social
ed' Gordon
chology: ThePrincetonSympisium ontheLegacy and Future of SocialCognition,
B. MJJkowitz (Mahwah, Ny, Lu1a,."o"" Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2001),
3-17'
iThe Social Role of Touch in Humans and Primates: Behavioural Func-
7. R. I. Dunbar,
tion and Neurobiological Mechanisms," Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34,
no.2 (2010): 260-68.
g. R. I. [i. Dunbar et al., "social Laughter Is Correlated with an Elevated Pain
Threshold,"
Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279 (2012):1161-67'
s. M. l. roe"pp et al., "ividencelor Endogenous Opioid Release in the Amygdala during
Positive Emotion," Neurolmage 44, no. 1 (2009): 252-56'
10. fack p. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, eds., From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Sci-
'ence Press, 2000)'
of Early ChitdhoodDevelopment(Washington, DC: National Academy
Development," CurrentDirections in
11. Charles A,\elson, "Neural Plasticity and Human
Psychologicalscience 8, no.2 (1999): 42-45'
12. Ailmee Ll Drolet and Michael W. Morris, "Rapport in Conflict Resolution:
Accounting
for How Face-to-Face Contact Fosters Mutual Cooperation in Mixed-Motive Conflicts,"
lournal of Experimental Social Psychology 36,
no. 1 (2000): 26-50; Mitzi M. Montova-
weiss et al., "Getting It Together: Temporal coordination and conflict Management in
Global virtuat Teams," Academy of Managementlournal44, no. 6 (2001): L25l-62.

Exploring Context
1. Examine your list of friends on Facebook or another social media or online
gaming
site. How many of them are "real" friends? Try applying the rule of three to your list of
friends. Does your experience confirm or challenge Konnikova's argument?

2" After you've examined your list of friends from Question 1 of Exploring Context,
com-
p.r" ihut list to the numbers you keep in your phone. Does the number of people you
phone reflect friendships than your
call relate to the Dunbar number? Does your closer
social media Presence?

3. Use a Web search engine to lookfor images of the Dunbar number. How do these visual
representations help explain the concept?

Questions for Connecting

This essay seems to imply that extended connections through social media are
less
1.
meaningful than the friendships at various levels of the "rule of three." Use the experi-
(p.406) and 'Action Makes lt
ences of Dan savage and Urvashi vaid in "lt Gets Better"
Better,,(p.411) to evaluate Konnikova's thoughts about real and virtual connections.
Given that both savage and vaid used social media to help LGBTQ youth, how might
even tenuous connections have value?
 The Limits of Friendship 2Ct

2. Konnikova discusses brain research to support her exploration of friendships and social
media. ln 'Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era" (p. 373), Richard Restak
also looks at the relationship between our behaviors and our brain. Synthesize the
work of these two authors to consider the ways technology is changing our brains. How
might "modern nerves" change our ability to relate to people in person? could the rule
of three mitigate our fragmented attention? You might also want to use your work from
Question 3 of Questions for Critical Reading.

3" Given the ways in which connections can proliferate on social media, what are the risks
of maintaining these connections? Consider the ways in which Konnikova's argument
might help explain the phenomenon of sexting, as explained by Hanna Rosin in ,,Why
Kids Sext" (p. 388). ls it easier to share photographs of others when they are not a part
of your close circleT Work with your definitions of the terms from Konnikova's essay
from Question 1 of Questions for Critical Reading.

Language Matters
1. Most often Konnikova spells out numbers, though occasionally she uses numerals
instead. Using a grammar handbook or other reference resource, review the rules for
writing numbers. when should they be spelled out, and when should numerals be
used? Apply your findings to Konnikova's text. Does she follow these rules? How can
you bring these insights to your own writing?

2. Quotations should always be integrated fluidly. Locate three instances where Kon-
nikova includes quotations. What strategies does she use to integrate quotations into
her own sentences? How can you apply these techniques to your own writing?

3. Editors often use correction symbols; your instructor might use them as well. Design
symbols to represent some common errors you make. How are design and meaning
related? Would your symbols make immediate sense to someone else?

Assignments for Writing

1. Write a paper in which you evaluate virtual friendships. Do they have advantages that
Konnikova doesn't consider? You may want to use your work from euestion 2 of eues-
tions for Critical Reading and Question 1 of Questions for Connecting.

2. Robin Dunbar's research focuses on the relationship between the social and the bio-
logical. Write a paper in which you evaluate the ways in which culture is determined by
biology. Are we limited by our biological impulses or can we transcend them? You may
find your work from Question 3 of Questions for Critical Reading useful.

3. How does technology influence social and biological evolution? Write a paper in which
you use Konnikova's work to consider the ways in which technology is affecting our
development. Draw from your work in Question 3 of euestions for Critical Reading in
making your response.