A perfect circle of friends

WHEN Facebook was founded in 2004, it expanded from a service for students at Harvard to a global phenomenon with one billion users.

But Facebook has not turned the world into a ‘village’, says Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University and author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? He will lecture at Listowel Writers’ Week, on May 31, on real and online friendships.

Dunbar says most people have five close friends. “When it comes to the number of people that you can have meaningful relationships with in a social sense, it’s about 150. That includes your family. Outside of that circle, there’s another layer that runs to around 500, which consists of people we think of as acquaintances.”