How to Be a Better Human - Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi: How many friends do I need?

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Time with friends just isn’t the same with a screen in between you. That’s a struggle many have faced recently, with half of Americans saying they’ve lost touch with at least one friend during the pandemic. It can be sad, but is falling out of touch with friends normal? How many relationships should we maintain, and what are the different kinds of friendships we need anyways? Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has been studying social relationships for 50 years, and he has answers. Data journalist Mona Chalabi maps out her own relationships against the averages, and invites us to do the same. This is an episode of Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. You can find and follow it wherever you're listening to this. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey there, Chris Dupie here. So today, instead of our podcast, instead of How to Be a Better Human, we have something a little bit different. We have an episode of a new podcast from the TED Audio Collective. It's a brand new show called Am I Normal? It's hosted by data journalist, Mona Chalabi.

And Mona is one of my favorite writers and thinkers and people. She does these incredible illustrations and she also is able to pull apart numbers and statistics and find the real stories behind them. These fascinating ways of looking at things where she sees what do the numbers and statistics reveal? What do they obscure? What are the narratives behind them? And listen, Mona is kind of one of those people where she finds these stories and then she's like the ideal dinner party guest because you turn to her and you're like, hey, there's this weird thing going on. Am I normal? And she goes,

let's dive into that. Let's talk about that. And let me tell you all the research. It's amazing. After you like it, be sure to follow Am I Normal with Mona Chalabi. And you can follow that wherever you're listening to this. Anywhere you got this podcast, you can get her podcast. OK, without further ado, am I normal? It's been about two months since I left New York for London. I'm still settling to my new flat here, putting up curtains, choosing a couch, all that. I arrived excited to be out of my tiny apartment. And now that COVID restrictions had lifted, I was excited to see people too. I'd been away from my London friends for a long time, so I knew that I needed to be proactive in re-establishing friendships here.

And I needed friends after so long alone. But it was hard. Restrictions might have lifted, but my anxiety had not. So maskless faces, even friendly ones, still inspired fear. Sometimes the sun stayed out for long enough that a get-together felt safe, even joyous. But it didn't last long. After an hour, my socially isolated brain would just go kaput. I'd run out of things to say and I'd run on home. It wasn't just that the world had changed. I had too. In the austere light of COVID, I re-evaluated some of my friendships. Loads of us did. Half of Americans said they lost touch

with at least one friend during the pandemic. For me, there weren't any big fights or disagreements, just an unkind stretching out of time between texts and calls. So there were the friendships that had soured, but there were also the ones that had shifted without the help of COVID. While I'd been running up tabs around Brooklyn bars before the pandemic, friends back in London had been settling down, acquired mortgages, partners, offspring. I loved them just as much as I did before their hands were full.

But they weren't as available as they had once been. After a while, my initial flurry of excitement to be newly back in London tapered off. And it gave way to a bit of loneliness. But is this just because of the move? Or is this post-pandemic life for everyone right now? I wanted to understand this all a little better. I wanted to put a number on it. What is a normal number of friends? From the TED Audio Collective, this is Am I Normal?

I'm Mona Chalabi and I'm a data journalist. In my work, I use numbers to make sense of a chaotic world. But the truth is, life is messier than that. And numbers don't always tell you the whole story. Today, I want to understand fun day out these days is going to look at curtain fabric with my mum. I am Mona's mum. I used to be a gynaecologist and then I switched into family practice or general practice. I worked for more

than just over 20 years and I retired six years ago and I'm enjoying my time. Okay. I think all you needed to give was just your name for that one, but that's okay. I do enjoy her company. The thing is though, I'm not going to go to the bar with her after a rough day. But since the friends I used to go to the bar with her after a rough day. But since the friends I used to go to the bar with are now washing babies' bums at tequila time, I was left with my mum. And so I thought, I may as well ask her how motherhood changed her friendships. Did my baby bum ever get in the way of her having a good time? What advice did she have for me about navigating old friendships with new mums? I think you have to accept it, that's the real life. She has her priorities, her husband

and her children, not you. Growing up, I don't remember you or dad having any friends. Literally, people came to the house to visit us for a meal meal maybe once a year. We didn't have that many friends. When I got married, I felt I have different convictions. When I started working, I come home tired. I want to look after my family. I was trying to enjoy you and your sister as much as I can. You know the friends that kind of disappeared a little bit while they had kids, while you had kids? Did you feel like those friendships ever came back

when me and my sister got older? Yeah, some of them. But I changed when I had my children. You become my world. You don't feel any regret or sadness about any of your friendships that disappeared? No, no, no. No, because those who disappeared, they weren't good friends.

The thing is, a friend is a big, big, huge blanket to cover so much. It's like carrying a fruit basket or apple basket with you. You know it was a good apple in it, and you're happy to carry it all the way. But then every time you open it because you need to have one, the good ones are no longer good. And so on, you just drop some of them on your way to wherever you're going. This is another one of my mum's analogies. And I don't know if I'm into it, but let's just go with it for a second. Maybe I have just dropped too many friends out of my basket.

Or maybe my friends dropped me out of their baskets. And he makes it into this weird fruit basket thing anyway. I put this to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. Can you define what a friend is for me? After 25 years trying to figure this out, I'm not sure I'm any nearer to a clear definition. I think in the end, it's about relationships in general. Those relationships can be people you regularly interact with or have positive feelings for. I mean, ideally, it's both. And the more you interact with them, or the more positive your feelings, the closer the friendship.

According to Dunbar, our Apple basket of relationships has an average of 150 people in it. This 150 figure is referred to as Dunbar's number. Now it might seem high, but what Dunbar is looking at is the number of relationships the brain can handle at one time. This includes family, best friends, acquaintances, workmates, even the bartender you know by name. So they're friends of a wide range of types, or as my mum calls it, a big blanket. Dunbar has studied social relationships since the 70s, first in primates, then in humans. He developed the number while studying primates' social networks, And that was when he noticed that the size of those social groups was relative to the size of the primates' brains.

And so I just, out of kind of idle curiosities, I thought, well, what happens if we stick human brains into this equation? And when we did that, it gave this figure of 150. And that number then just kept turning up all over the place. The figure popped up in surprising places. Offices, communes, militaries, even Christmas card lists. 150 is the estimated size of Neolithic farming villages in the Middle East and 11th century Britain.

The number of people that you have these kind of relationships of obligation and reciprocity that have a historical depth. At the population level, 150 is very, very consistent. Donbass is 150 for simplicity, but really it's a range between 100 and 250, depending on several factors. One is obviously personality. So introverts prefer to have fewer friends. They probably sort of hover around the 100 to 150 mark. If we think of time as our currency, we all have the same amount of it,

but it's how we spend it that varies. And introverts... They just prefer to kind of ladle that on thick on a few friends to make sure they're there when they need them. Whereas extroverts, they tend to spread their social capital more thinly in order to have a larger number of friendships. They trade on the fact that if somebody stands them up, they just try somebody else. Another factor is age. The size of personal social networks over the lifespan

increases as you grow through childhood, hits a peak somewhere in the late teens, early 20s at something approaching about 250. And then from about the 30s, surprisingly coinciding with reproduction, it drops to about 150, after which it remains very stable. And that's exactly what happened to me. My friends started having babies and started disappearing. Or actually, Dunbar would say they started shifting. You see, within that 100 to 250 friend range, there are layers, or concentric circles.

The first layer is about 1.5 people. That often represents your parents or your romantic partner. Then the next layer out is somewhere around about five. We think of those as your intimate friends. The next layer out is 15, those you might think of as best friends. Then there's a layer at 50, friends, a layer of 150 just friends, a layer of 500 which we think of as acquaintances. 50 good friends. 5-0. That feels like a whole lot of people.

And I think this is the tier where I'm having the most trouble. And the research shows that you need to invest around 200 hours over a three-month period to turn a just friend into one of those good friends. Even if it is quicker to turn someone that you already know back into being a good friend, well if Dunbar's 50 number is right that is still a whole lot of time maintaining friendships and I just don't know if I have that kind of time. I feel like I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here. The more I think about it, part of the problem here might be that some of the people who were once part of that super close friend group, maybe I just didn't do enough to keep them there. Certainly our research shows very clearly that if you fail to maintain that level of investment, friendships start to die slowly but surely. Friendships start to die slowly but surely.

Six months after you've not contacted them, they will have dropped down from being a good friend to maybe just a friend. And if it carries on for a couple of years, they will end up as an acquaintance. But we haven't been meeting in person because of the pandemic. So does that mean that everyone's friendships are suffering right now? The short answer is yes. Oh, God. But what about all the Zoom calls and my incessant meme sharing during lockdown?

Does this mean that all of my DMs were in vain? Digital media, and that even includes the telephone, are really just a sticking plaster. By the way, a plaster is a band-aid. They seem to slow down the rate of decay, but they're not going to stop the inevitable happening. So once in a while, you just have to meet up again and give each other a hug. That sort of resets the relationship, if you like. And this is what I'm afraid of.

Even though we can see each other in real life, I worry that too much time has passed for my London friends and I to be able to reset our relationships. But I have to say, there is something about this whole Dunbar number thing that just doesn't feel right to me. Having only five super close friends in my top tier feels way too few and 50 just good friends in the lower tier feels like way too many. For me at least it feels like I never had a life that really looked like the one he describes here and that's even when I was feeling satisfied with my friendships. Maybe I was just never normal to begin with or maybe I'm misremembering my pre-COVID life.

To find out, I took out the old colouring pencils and decided to plot my friends. We learned from Professor Dunbar that as humans, we can successfully maintain around 150 friends. Those friends fall into different layers depending on how close they are. So I wanted to see where my friends fall and if you'd like you can try this along with me. Grabbing some paper and some coloured pens. I am going to draw a smallish circle about the size of my fist. And then one... So I drew a circle that represented my innermost friends and put in their initials. And then there was the next circle out, some more initials, and the next circle out beyond that. I'm actually going to write my sister down.

And then there was the next circle out, some more initials, and the next circle out beyond that. I'm actually going to write my sister down. Who else? In touch with regularly. God, there's so few people in New York. Most of them, where else, where? I'm just going to move on to the next category because I am struggling a little bit it feels so shocking to me

that some people didn't immediately come to mind when I love them so deeply in fact I had to go into my phone to remind myself of the people I've been texting recently I am revising occasionally my innermost circle you would have thought those are the people that it's impossible to forget. I used a standard letter-sized piece of paper.

And honestly, I wish I'd had a whole whiteboard. The thing turned into such a mess. Basically, the thing that I'm taking away from this is that there are two friends that were in the middle who I've fallen out with over the space of the pasture, which is quite significant to have lost two. But I guess the thing that is interesting is that since they have left, two people who were in an outer circle have moved in. You know, you can think about the number of friends in the abstract in terms of data and statistics and the Dunbar number,

but then there's, like, staring at a sheet of paper with the reality of your friendships on it, and that feels different, because this isn't just a tally, there are names that I'm looking at in front of me. So I asked Professor Dunbar what all his research taught him about his own friendships. It is the nature of social networks, particularly the friendship component,

that they turn over with time. We don't retain the same friends throughout life. It's a very, very, very small number of people that we retain as lifelong friends. When I took a closer look at my friend data, I realised that I have nine super close friends, which is way more than this Dunbar average of five. So I'm friend rich. But then why do I still feel lonelier in London than I did in New York? Well, the answer might be in my lower tier of quote unquote good friends. You see, according to William Rawlins, friends serve three purposes. Someone to talk to.

Or if there are nature spots. Someone to depend on. Come here. And someone to have fun with. So while Dunbar counts up how many friends we have, Rawlins' research is way more interested in why we have those friends, what they do for us. So rather than me focusing on my totals here, I wanted to better understand how my friends make me feel. My layer of super good friends, the ones who are now mostly married,

are great at satisfying the first two qualities. Or as Dunbar puts it, satisfying the first two qualities. Or as Dunbar puts it, They're those relationships where you know the person in some considerable depth so that when crisis happens, the cavalry will come racing over the hill straight away. But they're too busy for their other friend purpose, the fun part. See, my lower layer of good friends in New York was huge and they were the fun ones. I could call them up for a drink, to go dancing. They were the Friday night

cavalry. But they weren't necessarily the Monday morning I am so depressed cavalry. In London, I don't have enough of the fun friends. I had been really worried about how to have fun with my existing friends. But really, what I needed to do was to find my new floozies. While I'm digging into the numbers, I realised that I don't have enough friends to just have fun with. It wasn't simply the number of friends. It was also the type of friendships that weren't fulfilling my needs. And I think this is a really important point. When we're trying to

figure out if something is normal, we tend to gravitate towards averages. But an average, which is what Dunbar's number is, doesn't actually tell us what normal looks like. which is what Dunbar's number is, doesn't actually tell us what normal looks like. Normal and average are not the same thing. And I'm not even getting spiritual with you here, I'm getting statistical. See, the average just takes all of our deeply varied experiences and flams them down into one number. Let's say you have a group of people, some of them their favourite fruit is plums and others prefer apricots. The average favourite fruit there is not a plum cot. That tells us nothing about the actual people we are looking at. See, for me, it wasn't the average, it was the

qualitative data that really helped me to understand what I needed. And if you did your own friendship mapping, when you look at your drawing, are you seeing what you need in life? In doing this exercise, I noticed something else. That shifting that had happened between the layers. In losing two friends, I gained two others. So maybe I just needed to trust that I will always have nine close friends.

They just might not be the same nine friends, as sad as that is to accept. Do you think that like changing friendships is just a natural part of life? Yeah. Yeah. I was curious how my mum's friends fluctuated throughout her life. How many friends did you have when you was in your 20s? Probably two or three. What do your friendships look like now that you are in your 70s? Since I retired and I have met recently some friends who are some of them are surprisingly younger than me but they are very good very very much caring. And there are people that

I didn't do much for them, but they seem to be doing a lot for me. Do you have friends of different ages? Yeah, I have friends who are 20 years younger than me. And her young friends, they're her fun friends. We go out, and if I go out with men, they just treat me like a princess. They love me and I love them. What more do I want from them? My mum has her fun friend cavalry. I just need to build that back up in London for myself. It's going to take a while.

And in the meantime, there's always my mum. Hi, Mona. Just seeing what you are doing tonight. I'd like to know if you are free to come look at paint sample with me. Call me back. am i normal is part of the ted audio collective it's hosted and produced by me mona chalabi and it's brought to you by TED and Transmitter Media. This episode was produced by Joanne DeLuna and Wilson Sayle. Wilson is also our managing producer, along with Lacey Roberts. Sarah Nix is Transmitter's

executive editor, and Greta Cohn is our executive producer. The TED team is Michelle Quinn, Banban Cheng, and Roxanne Heilash. Jennifer Nam is our fantastic researcher and fact checker. Additional production by Domino Sound. That original theme song was by Sasami. Michelle Macklem is our sound designer and mix engineer. Additional help from Kim Baikama. And special thanks to our very popular contributor, my mum. For the transcripts and research that I talked about in this show, you can check out the link in the description. We're back next week with more Am I Normal? So make sure you follow this show in your favourite podcast app. That way you can get every episode delivered straight to your device. And if you

enjoyed the show and want to support us, hit the share button and send it to someone else who wonders how many friends they should have.