Your Friends On Social Media Aren’t Really Your Friends

I know it's nice to have a lot of friends. That's why a lot of people collect them on Facebook.

To be fair, I do obsess over my Twitter follower count just in case you think I'm hating.......

But anthropologist Robin Dunbar came out with a new study explaining that most of the people on your social media view you as nothing more than a stat-padding profile.

This is done by something he has called "Dunbar's Number", which states people can only emotionally and mentally handle at most 150 relationships.

He studied over 3,000 Facebook users of varying ages, and he found that those 3,000+ people averaged 150 Facebook friends. However, of those 150, people could only count on an average of 4 friends in what his subjects considered an "emotional crisis". And only 14 would even express sympathy.

We know there's varying levels of friendships; some people we refer to as "friends' are merely acquaintances, or people we barely know and it's just easier to refer to them as the f-word.

According to Dunbar, social media networks encourage what he calls "promiscuous" friending of people who have "tenuous links to you".

He also added that online popularity does not equal actual popularity. "Heavy users of online social media do not have larger offline social networks than casual users, even though more of these may appear online for heavy users."

You may want to remember that when you do your spring cleaning of your contacts, as well as the junk said contacts send you on the regular.