Friendship is a necessity to all mankind, but it is a known fact that it can be a challenging decision to decide what kind of people someone should be in his or her friend zone. Friends are there to jubilate together in the person's celebration and share joy and celebrations during tribulations during hard times.
Needless to say, it is a matter of fact that it is challenging move to find such rare people in the multitude of social groups.
In contrast to companionship, loneliness is a fatal illness. According to a 2016 study, those who have six or more friends experience better health over the course of their life.
Other studies have also found those middle-aged women who had three or more friends tended to have higher levels of overall satisfaction in life. It has been proven that the number of friends is determined by many factors, including geographic proximity, marital status, occupation, age, and gender.
Time is one of the determinants of friendship, as the size of the friend zone may increase with time or, conversely, shrink as a result of dynamic changes throughout the course of life.
Additionally, it is a clue that some people may have higher social needs with a greater number of friends, and others might prefer lower indices. Friendship is an indisputably vital need for mankind. Unfortunately, the more people that gather around a person, the more the inevitability of the conflicts that may arise.
The 19th Century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer demonstrated human relations are like a porcupine that comes closer during cold climates but injures each in the process. He describes the predicament in human interpersonal dynamics concluding that despite goodwill, human interaction cannot occur without substantial mutual harm.
The British psychologist and anthropologists Robin Dunbar, whose theory came to be known as Dunbar's number, posits the hypothesis that human friends are cognitively able to maintain about 150 close friendship connections in a lifetime. The notion contextually describes the socially cohesive group that meets the person's requirements and behaviours in the selected small group.
The Social Hypothesis Theory, which became popular in the years of 1998, posits a correlation between the volume of the brain's prefrontal cortex volume and social network size found in humans in reflection of their social cognitive abilities.
As per the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, Dunbar's theory was tested using simple demographic indications such as social group size or differences in mating systems detailing the changes in subtleties of behaviours. Hypothetically, the theory arguments claim that group size is correlated to animals' abilities to maintain coherent social groups.
According to Dunbar, friendship tends to rise in the early ages of 20 to 30 years at the peak moment when people have about 150 connections, a number which remained stagnated until the 70s.
Dr Dunbar believes after 70, and the number starts to decline and "if a person long enough, the friendship only remains to two or one."
Dunbar's number has attracted attention and survived scientific scrutiny over the 30 years with over 1,400 papers on Google scholar and 26 500 00 hits on Google, but the theory has seen a time of criticism.
For instance, the anthropologist Frank Marlowe has suggested that hunter-gatherers spent most of their time in living "local bands", and typically only around 30 people are credible for social cohesion groups globally.
In response to Dunbar's number, Marlowe explains that local brands are often unstable and change in size, regularly levelling the theory as the simplistic emerging from it about a human organization.
Other research has contested the Dunbarian number, suggesting that the social network clusters can go beyond 290.