It might not seem likely when they’re liking your holiday photos or sharing that picture of your missing cat along with supportive love heart emojis, but a recent study maintains that, really, your Facebook friends don’t care too much about you.
The Royal Society report by Robin Dunbar says that if you have 150 Facebook friends, you can probably only rely on 4.1 of them; a dispiritingly low and exact number for all those internet pen pals out there.
According to Robin;
[A]s originally proposed by the social brain hypothesis, there is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcome. In practical terms, it may reflect the fact that real (as opposed to causal) relationships require at least occasional face-to-face interaction to maintain them.
All of which means; we have a limited amount of time, mental energy and emotional weight we can devote to our friend group as a whole, so no matter how big our Facebook friend count is, we really only feel very close to those we see the most often. The bad news; if you want to keep someone as a friend, you’ll have to start seeing them face-to-face rather than just screen-to-screen.
Ugh, doesn’t really seem worth it, does it?
