Dunbar’s 2021 book is a deep dive into different aspects of friendship.
Chapter 1: Why Friends Matter
“Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge from the medical literature over the past two decades has been the evidence that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to fall prey to diseases, and the longer we will live.” In other words, friends are vital for our health and wellbeing. In the first chapter, Dunbar sets out the evidence for this.
The biggest study he cites is from 2010 – this was a review of 148 studies that “provided data on factors that influenced people’s risk of dying”. In addition to diet, exercise, smoking, etc., factors related to social life were also included, such as how many friends people had, participation in social activities, and feelings of loneliness. The study concluded: “The influence of social relationships on risk for mortality is comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality.”
In Dunbar’s words: “Loneliness is turning out to be the modern killer disease, rapidly replacing all the more usual candidates as the commonest cause of death.”
(This UK study has provided more recent proof of the link between social connection and mortality).
Dunbar also refers to John Cacioppo and William Patrick’s book, Loneliness – Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, to further highlight the extent to which loneliness takes its toll on both our mental and physical health.
So, it’s clear friends are good for us. But how does this work, exactly? Dunbar admits this is not entirely clear, but suggests the following:
- Friends provide practical support – such as tending to us when we are sick, or lending an extra pair of hands when we move house. Doing everything for yourself all the time can be stressful! Having people around who can help us out with stuff is no doubt good for our wellbeing.
- Friends help us feel better psychologically – they provide emotional support, a shoulder to cry on, a listening ear. There’s a physiological basis to this – interacting with our friends activates endorphins, the body’s natural pain killers. Endorphins help to boost our immune system.
Dunbar sums up with this: “All in all, social isolation is not good for us, and we should make every effort to avoid it. Being social and having friends carries many psychological and health benefits. Friendship protects us against diseases as well as cognitive decline, allows us to be more engaged with the tasks that we have to do, and helps us become more embedded within, and trusting of, the wider community in which we live.”
So, what does this mean for socially distant people? Are we all doomed to die an early death?
I think it’s important to stress that it’s loneliness that’s been proven to be the killer – not solitude, or being alone per se. Some people may not socialise much, or they may not have many friends, but that does not necessarily mean they will feel lonely as a result. What’s the prognosis for people who like being alone?
Having said that, the evidence for the benefits of social connection is so overwhelming, that I think even those of us who insist we are better off alone, should take seriously what Dunbar is saying here. We may be okay now, but what about in the future? Can we honestly say that our lives of limited social interaction, with few (or no) friends, isn’t doing us any harm?…
Chapter 2: Dunbar’s Number
‘Dunbar’s Number’ is the “limit on the number of friends you can have”- and that number is 150.
So who counts towards your 150? In addition to all those you’d typically consider ‘friends’, Dunbar also includes family. “Family members are an important component of our social network” – they fill up the first of the 150 slots available and we will usually prioritise our family relationships over those with non-relatives.
Interestingly, Dunbar also says the following can be included in your network of 150: recently dead ancestors; “a favourite saint, the Virgin Mary, God”; your favourite soap opera character, and pets.
150 friends – to the socially distant person that seems like a lot! And yet, whilst Dunbar acknowledges that people vary in the number of friends they have, he says studies consistently show the range of variation in people’s social networks is “typically between 100 and 250 individuals”.
The fact that some people might have a much smaller social network is not mentioned by Dunbar. Rather, he seems more concerned with making sure people don’t go making too many friends, as any more than 150, he argues, and the human brain just won’t be able to handle it.
But what about those of us who can barely make one friend, never mind 150?!
Chapter 3: Making Friends With Your Brain
Dunbar explains research he carried out which showed “the more friends you had, the bigger were the bits of the brain known to be involved in social skills”.
He goes on to suggest that it could be “at least partly true” that “the number of friends you have determines the size of your brain” (my italics). He says: “It is possible that your prefrontal cortex and other social brain areas grow in size as a result of how much they are used”. However, given that the brain doesn’t develop much beyond your mid-twenties, “by the time you reach adulthood… your brain is probably pretty much fixed.”
This raises an intriguing (and also troubling?) question: Is the socially distant adult even capable of forming relationships after a certain age (if they so desire)? Or would their social brain areas have just become too stunted from lack of use to make that possible?
Dunbar also talks about the relationship between the amygdala (the part of the brain that makes us feel fear) and the orbitofrontal neocortex. Left to its own devices, the amygdala would make it impossible for us to form relationships with new people as we would always see them as dangerous strangers and want to run away. The orbitofrontal neocortex intervenes to “suppress the amygdala’s panicky responses”, allowing us to strike up conversations, and eventually establish connections, with new people. This makes me wonder whether the orbitofrontal neocortex functions slightly differently in those who are shy/socially anxious/avoidant – is it less effective at calming the amygdala in these people for some reason?
Chapter 4: Friendship In Circles
Dunbar explains how our social networks are made up of layers, or circles. For those with 150 friends, this is made up of a circle of five ‘close’ friends, “the shoulders-to-cry-on friends”; followed by another circle made up of 15 ‘best’ friends, “the people you invite round for a quiet dinner” or go to the pub with; then another of 50 ‘party’ friends, and finally a circle of 150 containing all those ‘just friends’ aka “the people that would turn up to your once-in-a-lifetime events” such as a wedding.
Each circle includes the friends in the previous circle – so the five ‘close’ friends are included in the 15 ‘best’ friends circle, and so on.
60 per cent of our time is devoted to those in the five and 15 circles.
Dunbar relays the findings of some research into social interactions on Twitter which suggested that some people’s entire social networks exist online. This seemed to baffle Dunbar: “Do these people really live their entire social lives online, with few face-to-face contacts in the real world?” He admits this “implies a degree of social isolation that I had never really anticipated” and finds it quite alarming.
I was quite surprised Dunbar was so surprised by this, to be honest, given the extent to which he’s researched human sociality. Has he never come across less social individuals? Is it really that incomprehensible that people turn to the internet for a social life in this day and age? And why does this necessarily have to be alarming?
He implies virtual interactions and online relationships can never be a substitute for IRL connections. I think this betrays a bit of an old-fashioned mindset, and a rather closed one in relation to socially atypical people (yes, we do exist!).
Chapter 5: Your Social Fingerprint
Dunbar looks at the amount of time we spend socialising – on average, it’s around three and a half hours a day.
He goes on to talk about how much effort is required to maintain friendships – and how in many cases “friendships are fickle things… matters of convenience – someone to party with… who will do for the moment in the absence of someone better.”
Only a “very small handful of friendships… seem to stand the test of time and absence.” These are usually friends we’ve grown up with and/or shared significant life events with. This makes me wonder: at some point, does it become too late to establish deep, lasting friendships? If you didn’t have friends to see you through your formative years, if there’s no one with whom you’ve shared your past, can you only expect to establish superficial bonds with others after a certain point?
Chapter 6: Friends In Mind
Dunbar further explores just how much effort is involved in making and keeping friends: “friends are not, in reality, all that easy to acquire and maintain.”
“The social skills that make the world possible are astonishingly sophisticated, and the cognitive mechanisms that underpin these skills are a miracle of evolutionary engineering.” However, we don’t tend to be conscious of just how much work our brains have to do to successfully navigate the social world, Dunbar says, which of course, is another way of saying that humans are naturally social beings.
But there are people who find socialising difficult and for whom it doesn’t feel natural at all. Dunbar acknowledges that “we all vary in our ability to manage the social world” – but other than one brief example he gives of an autistic boy, he shows no interest in exploring such people.
Chapter 7: Time and the Magic of Touch
In this chapter, Dunbar talks about the role of neurochemistry in social bonding and how the neurochemical make-up of our brains influences our individual “social style”.
In summary, the endorphin-dopamine system seems to be “central to how we interface with the social world.” Dunbar focuses on how touch and spending time with others triggers our endorphin system.
Dunbar talks about a study which found that people with a “cool attachment” style “had a much lower density of endorphin receptors”. This makes it harder for them to get a ‘buzz’ from socialising.
Chapter 8: Binding the Bonds of Friendship & Chapter 9: The Languages of Friendship
In chapter 8, Dunbar explores the other “social behaviours” that activate our endorphin system – laughter, singing and dancing, storytelling and feasting.
Chapter 9 looks at conversation. Dunbar makes a couple of interesting points here from a socially distant point of view. One of which is that the majority of our conversations involve “the exchange of social information about ourselves… discussions about our relationships and those of third parties, arrangements for future social events and reminiscences about past ones.”
This backs up something I’ve mentioned before about how participating in everyday chit-chat can be hard for those of us who don’t have much of a social life. People tend to talk about what they do with other people – and so when you’re not very social, it can be hard to contribute to conversations and establish connections, because what do you have to say?
Chapter 10: Homophily and the Seven PIllars of Friendship
Dunbar explains how we select our friends by applying the ‘seven pillars of friendship’. This basically comes down to finding things you have in common – sharing the same language, growing up in the same place, having the same education/career experiences, having the same hobbies/interests, sharing the same views, having the same sense of humour, and having the same taste in music. The more of these pillars you share with someone, the more potential there is for friendship.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dunbar says that we tend to gravitate towards people who are similar to ourselves. What is more surprising is Dunbar’s claim that “friendships are born and not made. You just have to find them. It may take several goes before you find the right person to be your best friend… but if you keep searching you will find them eventually.”
Chapter 14: Why Friendships End
In this chapter, Dunbar points out that the pain of social rejection is very real and can have a long-lasting impact. “One study looked at brain activity during both social exclusion, and a physical-pain task at the same time, and found that there was considerable overlap in brain activity in both these regions.”
Dunbar looks at what causes friendships to break down. But why do some people struggle to make friends in the first place? This isn’t something Dunbar considers in this book, unfortunately. And yet, given that loneliness is on the rise, and people report having fewer friends now than they did 10 years ago, isn’t this something worth exploring?
Socially Distant 