Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 372: The Science of Making and Keeping Friends | Robin Dunbar

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Friendship might not necessarily be something you’ve considered to be an urgent psychological and physiological issue. One thing we explore a lot on the show is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life, and sadly, in many ways, it’s harder than ever to make and keep friends. With loneliness and disconnection on the rise, our society just wasn’t constructed for social connection, and recent data suggests we’re in a friendship crisis, with many of us reporting that we have fewer close friendships than ever.Our guest today is Robin Dunbar, an Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University and the author of numerous books on the development of homo sapiens. Dunbar is perhaps best known for formulating “Dunbar's number,” which is a measurement of the number of relationships our brain is capable of maintaining at any one time. He is a world-renowned expert on human relationships, and has a ton of fascinating research findings and practical tips for upping your friendship game.In this conversation, we dive into the science behind human relationships, the upsides and downsides of maintaining friendships on social media, the viability of friendships across gender lines, and what science says you can do to compensate if you feel you are currently lacking in close friendships. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/robin-dunbar-372-rerunSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hola, hello, how's everybody doing? Maybe it's just me, but I have really never considered friendship to be an urgent psychological and physiological issue. That view, which I held more subconsciously than consciously, is completely wrong headed,

of course. If I've learned one thing hosting this show over the past few years, it's that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. I picked that expression up from the great psychotherapist, a stare perl, just to give credit where it's due. In any event, making and keeping friends is truly an urgent issue. And sadly, in many ways, it is harder now than ever. Of course, the pandemic has made keeping in touch with people at least face to face in meaningful ways, very hard. Even before that, though, loneliness and disconnection was on the rise,

our society just really is not constructed for social connection. In fact, recent data suggests we're in something of a friendship crisis with many of us reporting that we have fewer close friends than ever. So what can you do about all of this? I have three pieces of good news. First, my guest today is a world-renowned expert on human relationships. He has a ton of fascinating research findings and practical tips for upping your friendship game. Second, next week we're kicking off a brand new series of episodes here on the podcast, focusing on one of the foundations of all successful human relationships kindness. This new series is a collaboration with the very funny show Ted Lasso, which he airs on Apple TV plus.

In fact, we're calling it the Ted Lasso series. Just to say, if you haven't seen that show and you have no plans to see the show, it's fine. You'll get tons out of this series. Just so you know, the show is all about an American football coach who takes a job coaching soccer in England, hilarity, and soos. What saves him really is that he's a very, very nice guy. And there is a common misconception that nice guys always finish last or that kindness is somehow soft or fluffy.

But we're going to be bringing on some top scientists from Berkeley and from Stanford who are going to talk about how the research suggests that compassionate people are actually happier, healthier, and more successful. And we're going to have a bonus meditation from the one in Only Sharon Salisberg, and we're going to introduce you to a phenomenal Dharma teacher who will be making a TPH podcast debut. So I'm looking forward to that. I hope you'll join us for that. And my final piece of news is that the week after we do the Ted Lasso series here in

the podcast, we're going to launch a little Ted Lasso challenge over on the 10% happier app. Every day during the challenge, you'll get a little video featuring yours truly, along with some short clips from the Ted Lasso show, explaining how you can use kindness to improve your relationships with your family, your friends, yourself. And then after the video, you'll get a powerful and bespoke guided meditation that will help you practice what you just learned. This challenge, the Ted Lasso challenge, will be short and sweet just five days,

so you can commit to it, complete it, and reap the benefits in short order. We really do think we've cooked up something pretty special here. We hope you'll be part of it. You can download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and get excited for the Ted Lasso Challenge to launch on September 7th. Okay, let's let's circle back now to the first piece of good news today's guest. He is one of the world's leading experts on relationships. As I said, his name is Robin Dunbar. He's an emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University.

He's the author of numerous books on the development of our species. He's perhaps best known for formulating something called Dunbar's number, which is a measurement of the number of relationships our brain is capable of maintaining at any time. It's actually quite important, he'll explain it better than I have.

In this conversation, you're gonna hear Professor Dunbar talk about the science behind human relationships, how to make and keep friends, the upsides and downsides of maintaining relationships on social media. Interestingly, he's a much less anti-social media than you might guess. We'll talk about the viability of friendships across gender lines and what science says

you can do to compensate if you feel you are currently lacking in close friendships. He's also going to touch on another of his very interesting areas of expertise, Gossip, which he argues has gotten a bad rap. So, without further ado, here we go now with Robin Dunbar. Professor Robin Dunbar, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. I've been looking forward to this. There's so much here to talk about. Let's just start with a question. I'm sure you've got in a million times, but it's a good way to level set for the audience here. What is Dunbar's number? Essentially, it's the limit on the number of relationships, meaningful relationships

that you can have at any one time. So that includes friends, it includes family, most of your extended family probably. It might even include your cat and your dog and your favorite horse, and maybe your favorite soap opera character on TV. If you feel you have a meaningful relationship with them, you talk to them, you feel that they communicate back with you. Usually, of course, most of the people, your number of 150, which is the core number for Dunbar's number, are actually real people, of course, and they're people you see on a fairly regular basis. I don't know if you were being somewhat, maybe semi facetious with the TV show thing, but there are people who feel

They have an active ongoing Conversation with and relationship with God or Jesus. Oh absolutely. Yes, I absolutely so I'm and that's If you like a perfectly reasonable thing to have God or Jesus or you know the Virgin Mary or Catholic perhaps Or indeed, I'm quite serious, that some people really do feel that they have relationships with the people on TV shows and so on. My grandmother always said goodnight to the newscaster when he said goodnight to her,

and called him by name, with her sure she felt that she was very much in her circle. I'm maybe not the closest friend she ever had, but, you know, he's sat there and she saw him every night on TV news at the anchor. And, you know, she said, good night to him. He was part of her social circle. Well, on behalf of newscasters everywhere, given that I am one, at least for now, I appreciate that.

My salutations right back at your grandmother. How did you come up with their number 150 though? Well originally it was predicted off the back of an equation relating the size of social groups in monkeys and apes, the primates, that's the zoological family to which we belong. And their brain sizes, so species that lived in big social groups had big brains and the outer curiosity I just plugged human brains into the same equation to see what kind of figure it gave and it gave a figure of about 150 and that just set me going looking to see whether this could possibly be true because I actually thought it was far too small after all we live in huge cities

with tens of millions of people. And I thought that 150 sounds awfully small for that, but then it transpired eventually when we started looking at the size of personal social networks, the people that you have meaningful relationships with. This is about what that number is. It's somewhere between 100 and

200. We can sign out many more people on Facebook than that, but they tend to fall into the category of acquaintances. Of course, we have acquaintances in real life, too. We work with a lot of these people. We go out and we'd have a beer with them maybe after work or engage with them over lunch or the with them maybe after work or engage with them over lunch or the water cooler or something, but we probably wouldn't invite them home. So it turns out that quite a good definition for this number is the number of people who would feel an obligation to you and a closeness that they would turn up for your bar mitzvah, your wedding or your funeral. So that's the Dumbar's number is really your bar mitzvah, stroke wedding, stroke funeral group size. And indeed, if you look at the very nice website that provides data on American weddings, that is exactly the average size of weddings

in America. And it's been very consistent for the last decade. Well, I can't say for the last year maybe. But part of that it has been a very, very consistent number. It seems to be sort of the number of people that kind of mean something to you and you'd feel a sense of obligation to them and you know that if you ask them to do your favor, they would kind of say yes, they might kind of be a bit grudging, but they do it out of obligation to you. So you were initially surprised you said at the number 150 because you thought maybe that was a little small, but the numbers get really small when you're talking about truly close, intimate relations. Yeah, so it turns out that this number 150 is really just one of a series of numbers if you like a series of circles of friendship. So if you imagine yourself as a stone being thrown into the lake,

you would have this set of ripples that run out from the stone. And as the ripples go out, of course, they get bigger, but if you like the amplitude, the height of the wave gets gradually smaller and smaller until it dies away. So your social world bears some relationship to this, really, in the sense that you're surrounded by a series of layers of friendship. And the innermost layers are very small, they're typically about five people on average, but they're really intense relationships. They're what I call the shoulders to cry on friendships.

These are the people that, when your world falls apart, they will drop everything to come and pick you up again. But then out beyond that, you get sort of progressively larger and larger layers, but the emotional quality of those relationships. And the frequency that you see the people in these layers falls away until you get to the 150. And then beyond the 150, we know there are at least three more layers,

one at 500, which would include all your acquaintances. And these layers count cumulatively, by the way. So the 500 would also include your 150 inside, but an additional 350 people who you sort of, you know, counter-sequent as you know them well. Again, as I say, you work with probably a lot of them. It might include the kind of barista you buy, or you used to buy your latte coffee from on the way to work.

And it perhaps passed the time of day and a brief chat with them. But it out beyond that, there's another layer of people whose faces you can put names to, and then finally, what seems to be the outermost layer, takes us out to about 5,000 people, is the number of faces you can recognize as having seen them before. Are they complete strangers,

or have you seen that photograph before? So that kind of led just inside that of photographs you can put name to, will include all sorts of people that you don't really have a meaningful relationship with. So for all of us, the better off at worst, Donald Trump sits in there because we've seen him so often on television, probably the Queen having them would sit in there because most of us have seen it very familiar, but you know, if you bumped into them in the street and wandered over and clapped them on the shoulder and said, hi there, come and have a beer with me. They'd probably look a bit surprised and maybe some gentleman with a very large bowl, gender, his left armpit would hustle you away rather quickly.

Let's just go back to the close friendships. And I don't want to stress again, you're using friendship in the broadest, sort of most capacious way here that it can include your romantic partner, it can include your mom, your child, whatever. But four to six, or five, or whatever the number is, that is not a lot.

And as I understand it, your argument is, this is a zero sum thing that somebody else is gonna get knocked out if you add a new, truly close friend. I sometimes say, when we use the word friend here, we use it in the Facebook sense. It's anybody you feel you have for relationship with, of course, that is gonna include your mom

and it's gonna include your romantic partner and your granny and as well as your more conventional friends. But these numbers see to be quite robust. These layers seem to be quite robust and they're partly because they seem to reflect the brain's ability to handle relationships of a particular emotional closeness, but they're also a consequence of how much time we invest in the relationship. So in order to keep a friendship in particular, going, working, if you like, we have to keep engaging with the person, somehow or other, usually of course it's in a face to face way.

We see them once or twice a week or whatever it is and we go out with them, hang out with them. If you don't do that for some reason, perhaps because you've moved away, or because you've met somebody else who's more interesting, then the emotional quality of that friendship is going to just decay ever so slowly but surely and eventually if you don't see them for a couple of years or so they will drift down through the layers from being a good friend, probably not your best friend ever but certainly a good friend will kind of end up as an acquaintance eventually. Somebody who wants new but you haven't seen for ages so you don't really know what they're doing these days and that kind of movement

goes on all the time. It's particularly dramatic, I think, among late high school early college age group where they're meeting lots of new people. So we reckon there's about a 30% turnover in the position of friends and their social networks every year. And it's true of us older folk, if I can use the word, politely in this context. Our friendships

change over time too and in fact even our family relationships we kind of see less as somebody because we're seeing more of somebody else when we feel more engaged with with with the new person and and you know they fit better with our our social interests if you like and this constant change upwards and downwards is just going on all the time. Usually the people at the very, very center remain fairly stable for very long periods, but it is a dynamic social world that we live in. How are you defining close friends? What are the metrics that are important? Well, we use a very simple rating metric, which is simply a 1 to 10 scale. How emotionally close do you feel to this person where 10 is effectively, I love them

dearly, and one is, I'm kind of neutral. There's no negative component to it. It's kind of neutral up to, I love them dearly. And if you ask people to rate everybody that they know on this scale, then you see these layers pop out quite nicely. And that scale then turns out to correlate very nicely with the time devoted to that person. So the people you are emotionally closest to, you see most often. So that means that we can then use kind of just the frequency with which

people contact each other, be that phone, be that posting, a named posting on social media, be that a text, any kind of contact, you can pick up the same layers, the same frequencies of contact. We've telephone people with the same frequencies as we see them and we text them at the same frequencies. As we see them, we post to them on social media with more or less the same frequencies as we see them. It's an extremely robust effect. So one implication of that of course

is that social media in general, and digital media in general, so including cell phones and the like, substitute quite well it seems for face-to-face contacts. They're not quite as effective or quite as good, we don't feel so satisfied by a virtual meeting as we do with a face-to-face meeting, but as a default, as you might say, the digital world kind of does its job pretty well on the whole. It's interesting because most of the people come on the show are pretty anti, not anti, but a wary of technology. It sounds like you're a little bit more open.

I guess I'm kind of neutral. I mean, I actually think it does do a good job in the sense that it does allow us to keep contact with friends who are not easy to see in a face-to-face situation because they've moved away, perhaps. And that's good and that's kind of healthy, but I do think it has a downside quite clearly. And one of those is kind of an obvious one, really, because people kind of make this mistake often, I think, is, you know, if a very good friend moves away, one of your shoulders to cry on friends, that relationship is so important to you, is you, they try and keep it going through telephone calls and social media and so on. When you have to ask whether they might not be better finding a new shoulder to cry on just around the corner of say, well,

whom they, you know, when their world falls apart, they can walk round the block, knock on their door and say, you know, give us a hug or, you know, why don't we go out and have a coffee somewhere and talk through, you know, the issues that I have, and you can help me, you know, that physical access as it were, face-to-face actors, where you can sort of have a hug from them, and all these other things that we do with close friendships. Really is very important and you can't do that from the digital world. So you're basically saying something similar to what I believe, Crosby Stills and Nash said about, you know, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

So that puts you in your generation. Well, we used the word old before. I felt like I was, you know, I felt, I'm comfortable being lumped in there. I'm just got my A or P card the other day. So I'm good to go. Join the club. So I just go back to this five number, what I think it may be four to six,

but whatever, for close friends. So if I have a, I personally have a wife and a young son, that means I've only got three to four slots open, whereas my brother, who has a wife and six children, was that mean like one of the kids is not gonna make it, make the cut, and does that mean like, I can't get into my brothers in a circle?

Wow. I couldn't possibly coven it. The answer is, I mean, these numbers are kind of, you know, every data set we look at, we see the same numbers. But they are kind of variable. And they do depend a lot on individuals, social skills and social cognitive abilities as well. But we have to make judgments about how close we feel we are to people and where we put them and therefore how much time we invest in them.

The average number is always about five, but it does vary between four and six or maybe even a little wider than that perhaps. But typically that intercourse is two close family members and two close friends and then one from either side to make up the fifth. But if you meet somebody really importantly new and so meeting a prospective romantic partner who attracts your attention is the classic case. Then actually the amount of time you invest in that person results in somebody being squeezed out. In fact, it turns out that when you fall in love with somebody, the attention and effort, mental effort you give to them is so great that you

actually cause two other people to be thrown out of your inner self because they're not thrown very far. I mean, they just shift over into the next layer, is it were the 15 layer of what you might think of as best friends as opposed to intimate friends. So they're still there, but they just don't get in quite as much attention from you. Now, the merit of family relationships, and here you are rescued as it were in terms of being in your brother's social network. Family relationships seem to be much more robust to these kind of decay effects than friendships are. So there's something about the kind of spiders web of interconnections that families create as it were by the very fact that they're an extended family, that helps to hold people in place.

So family relationships, they tend to be cheaper to maintain in that respect. So you can kind of leave them be and not invest too much in them on a day-to-day basis, knowing that when you can get together, you can pick up that relationship where you left off the last time without it having been dented too much.

Now that really doesn't happen with friendships. If you leave a friendship, be for a long period of time, you've got a lot of renegotiating to do when you eventually meet up again, if that's a year or two down the line. There's a way in which, to some ears, this discussion of friendship could sound light Light not superficial but you know like not urgent. However, you make the point and I'd love to hear you say more about this that this actually is an urgent issue in that the quality of your friendships.

Really will dictate the quality of your mental and physical health. the quality of your mental and physical health. Oh yes, I think one of the most surprising findings that has popped out of the woodwork over the last decade, decade and a half, probably not much more than that really, in the medical literature, has been the extent to which the best predictor of your psychological health and welfare, your physical health and welfare, even how long you're going to live in the future, is just the quality and number of close friendships you have, and that is way more important than all the things your friendy neighbor or doctor usually worries about on your behalf, all the things like, you know, how much do you eat, how much alcohol do you drink, how much do eat, how much alcohol do you drink,

how overweight are you, how much exercise do you take, what medicines are you on, what's the air quality in the place where you live like. All these kinds of things certainly have an effect on your health and wellbeing, but they are pale almost into insignificance by comparison with simply the number and quality of close friendship. So we've just published a paper on Urch as a prospective study, so it's kind of looking at how likely you are to develop symptoms of depression in the future and the best predictor of not developing depression as it were, it's a major issue and this is for older people. It's simply either having around four to five good friends or engaging in around about three voluntary activities. So you can compensate that. So by voluntary activities,

I mean doing things like, you know, perhaps helping to run the scouts or helping out at your local church or some local hobby or interest group or your local club, sports club, whatever it may be, health club, all these kinds of social things where you meet people and you're kind of embedded into a social environment with people. You can't do both, you can't have five friends and engage in three voluntary activities that actually makes you worse off because what you're doing is just spreading yourself too thinly, but you can have let's say three friends and two activities or four friends and one activity or three activities and two friends who can trade off between the two. And what that kind of speaks to me

about really is the fact that it's being engaged with people, it's seeing people on a regular basis, it's being immersed in a kind of social world, cocooned in this little social world, and that's what kind of lifts you up, makes you just feel better psychologically, and that has these knock-on consequences for your physical health, which are quite dramatic, and really affect even things like the risk of heart attacks and cancers and so on. As an evolutionary psychologist, what's your take on why this is so important? Oh, well, this is a very long story. We got time.

It goes back to sort of origins, whereas the member of the primate, the monkey and eight for a zoological family, the big evolutionary development that monkeys and apes, if you like, invented, is as a way of coping with the difficulty of successfully surviving and reproducing in the world. It was the formation of bonded relationships and bonded social groups, so they club together to, essentially, I guess, watch each other's back, because the main thing that's causing Formation of bonded relationships and bonded social groups, so they club together to essentially I guess watch each other's back because the main thing that's causing them problems is predation risk.

It's predators running around on the forest floor or the savanna floor or whatever it may be and predators tend to go for individuals who are on the prey animals that are on their own if you like. So, primary solution to that, as with many other mammals and birds, in fact, is to form social groups as a protection. Everybody clubs together to reduce the risk of being caught on a worse bite predator, but the problem is by living in close proximity, it's very stressful. As we know, you know, if you're living on top of people, it can be very niggling at times.

And so it is with monkeys and apes. And their solution to that is to form these very close bonded friendships, which just keep everybody else off your back far enough that they don't destabilize the group. So it's a very fine balancing act they're doing. It's just one reason why this whole family has such big brains compared with all the other one reason why this whole family has such big brains compared with all the other mammals and birds. And, you know, we just follow suit as members of that family. This is our social strategy as well, except that we live in bigger groups, so we have a bigger brain that allows us to handle more relationships. That's the only real difference, but the way we bond our friendships, the way we bond

our social groups is very, very similar to the way monkeys' names do it. I believe you've also written from the physiological standpoint about the importance of endorphins. Yeah, the endorphin system in the brain, which is kind of these little chemicals that are major part of the brain's pain management system, and in fact the name in dolphin is a contraction of endogenous morphine because chemically they're very closely related to morphine. But because the body is adapted to them, we don't get addicted to them, and they're just slightly chemically different that we don't get addicted to them.

And they're very remarkable. They're deeply involved as neurotransmitters in many things they do. But one of the things that seems to be very important is they underpin social bonding. So they create this sense of warmth and relaxation and sort of comfortable nurse and trust and bondiveness. When we do things with somebody else that releases endorphins, though, in monkeys and apes that social grooming we have a highly specialized neuro system that runs from receptors at the base of every hair follicle in your body straight up into the brain and triggers an endorphin release whenever the hairs of your body are mechanically moved, which is what happens

during grooming. So grooming, social grooming, the leafing through the fur to remove bits and pieces of vegetation, what have you, that monkeys and apes do is the kind of core to the creation of these bonded friendships, if you like. And that movement through the fur of the hand as they part the fur and stroke it is what triggers these mechanical receptors at the base of the hair follicle. Now these only respond to light-slow stroking and exactly about one and a half inches per second. If you stroke faster than that or slower than that, it doesn't set the receptors off. And that speed turns out to be the speed of social grooming. And we see it in humans. You can see the brain firing. If you put somebody in a brain scanner, we can see the

brain firing or the brain's endorphine receptors firing up when we're stroked very gently on the torso, for example, and these, although we don't obviously have very much hair anymore, nonetheless the receptors are still there all over the skin and as they're mechanically moved as you stroke the skin, so it fires it up. And we've discovered how to exploit that system more generally so that we can kind of virtually groom with more people, because one of the problems with the touch-based system is it's just as intimacy. You know, you sort of want to go around caressing and stroking everybody in the community, but even though you want to bond with them, this is something you do with your intimates. But in order to sort of extend this mechanism out to create bonded relationships with

the wider community, what we've discovered is you can trigger the same mechanism by a whole series of other behaviors which now form a core part of our social toolkit, if you like, these include laughter, they include singing, dancing, many of the rituals of religion feasting together, so eating socially, drinking alcohol in particular, and telling emotional substories. All of these trigger the endorphin system extremely well and allow us to kind of, if you like, groom virtually with large numbers of other people and therefore bond bigger communities. And of all these things really is probably the best. We call it the

icebreaker effect because you can literally turn complete strangers into people who think they've known each other for life by just an hour's community singing around the campfire. And of course, singing is what we're doing church or many other religious services, various religions. Much more of my conversation with Robin Dunbar right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru

goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul, Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. I have a million questions on to serve tendrils of my interest spread out in a lot of different directions, but just to put a fine point on the urgency

of this issue, can I just get you to make your pitch to anybody out there who might be thinking consciously or subconsciously, you know, that friendship is not something I need to take seriously for my psychological and physical health. What would you say to anybody who continues to harbor some doubt? Let's be fair at the outset and say, look, some of us are more social than others. Some of us are happy on our own with fewer friends. Some of us, you know, kind of like to become more, more social butterfly

like and like to have lots of friends. Basically, that's the difference between introverts and extroverts. The difference is simply that introverts prefer to have fewer friends and give each other more time, set the relationships a more robust extroverts prefer to have more friends, but spread their available social time more thinly and therefore they have less close relationships on average. These are just equally good ways of solving the same problem, but it highlights the point that some of us prefer to have fewer friends, perhaps a little more asocial in that sense. Other people are really like to have lots of see lots of people and have lots of friends, even if they're a bit more casual. So to do without friends altogether, I think

it is very difficult. And I think most of those who don't have friends, although for a while they may feel very happy about that, they will come a time in the end, I think, when loneliness will hit you and it will have serious psychological and physical consequences. This is what kind of underpins the pandemic of loneliness that really the whole of the Western world has been suffering for some time now in respect of the elderly, that the elderly often feel very isolated. They can't get out, of course, so easily they're not up to going clubbing or playing around a goal for whatever it is just physically, so they don't get out, they don't have the opportunity to beat people anymore.

And they end up with smaller and smaller social networks and become intensely lonely and depressed and for prey to even minor illnesses that the rest of us would be able to shrug off. So it's fine to be on your own for a bit, sometimes that's a relief as you might say from the pressures of the social world, but don't stay in that hole for too long. I'm glad you drew the line there between an extroversion and an introversion because I

mean, I have a little of both, but I probably lean toward extrovert and I might have forgotten to ask that question, so I'm glad you brought that up. It did bring to mind for me though, I wonder how you compute the fact that there are these contemplatives or meditators who live in caves largely on their own and appear from the brain scans to be sort of at the apex of psychological health. Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the reasons, of course, is that they are often

in doing things which are highly ritualized and which we use very often in in religious services of one religion or another to bring people into trans states. So with the, there's some suggestion here that going into trans involves the release of a massive endorphine surge, which is why you get this feeling of relaxation and calmness and all the peace with the world and the world is wonderful and and so on, that you get from from going into trance and in many people's experience. You can bring that on traditionally, of course, if you think of Native American sweat houses and the kind of rituals associated with that. That's one way of doing it but equally you can sit in quiet contemplation and this is the yoga tradition as it were came out of India. You can go into trance in a quieter and more controlled way.

That often involves control over breathing and this harks back a little bit to the role of seeing and bringing on this sense of camaraderie and so on that we get and the ice breaker effect because breathing is very hard to do or to control, to do it very slowly in a controlled way, seems to trigger the endorphin system. That's why laughter also triggers the endorphin system it seems. So, you know, if you keep dosing up if you like to put it this way on these in dolphin producing effects you can do it on your own and I dare to suggest that if you walk past the gymnasium anywhere in the nearest city to where you live or indeed you watch a group of joggers running along you will see people who are getting in, in, in dwarf in fix, largely on their own and coming away from it, feeling really nicely set up for the day that the, you know, they

can approach the rest of the day's work and activities in a more kind of peaceful, zen-like way if we might put it that way. It doesn't seem to be remarkable. It's a physical activity. That's why dancing works in this way, for example. So you can do it. My sense though is it requires probably a special sort of person who would want to be able to do that for the rest of their life and not have any kind of deep social engagement with people because one of the things we do find is if you do any of these activities in synchrony as a group of people it ramps up the endorphin effectively, absolutely dramatically. Something about doing something like singing or laughing or physical exercise, even jogging

in a group rather than on your own, all these things ramp up the endorphine effect and give you a much bigger pit if you like to put it this way. And you come out of it feeling relaxed and calmed and the stresses of the world drop away from your shoulders and you can face the day at work or wherever in a much more contented frame of mind. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how to make and keep friends because I suspect there may be some people listening who are saying, well first of all many of us are still constricted because of the pandemic, either because there's still lockdowns in our area

or we have some nervousness about going out or our offices are not open. But even beyond that, there are, you know, there are people out there who just feel like, you know, maybe I move somewhere for work and I don't know how to go meet people and I don't have any family and friends around or, you know, in this digital era, it's hard to meet people. So, what do you say to people who might be sold, but don't know what to do about it? I think this is the great dilemma

of the modern world actually, because if you go back a hundred years or so, probably a great deal less than that even, people who spent most of their life within a relatively small community and communities in some sense function much more as communities by and large. We've become so mobile particularly since the kind of second world war when cheap transport became available and the sort of greasing globalization that's allowed us to

move for jobs or you know just to go and retire by the seaside in your old age and all these kind of things that we do. But it's one of the difficulties everybody has who has to move is kind of trying to re-embed themselves into a new social network. And part of the problem is actually, because thanks to digital media, they spend a lot of time trying to keep their old relationships going on at the end of a computer.

When in fact, actually they should be getting out. Now the question is, where do you go to meet people? For most people, there are two major choices. One is where you work because you spend such a large part of your life in the workplace. And, of course, you get to know people there and perhaps meet friends and so on. The other is probably church-based type or whatever temple type communities you go there, it provides you with a ready-made social environment. For the rest it's hard work because you've got to go and sort of join clubs of one kind maybe or hang out in bars just to have the opportunity to meet people and that makes it much harder.

So of course we're kind of sometimes nervous of doing that, perhaps a good reason. And so, you end up spending more time locked in your room. And it's hard to know how to solve that problem. We've kind of made this artificial environment of the quantum world ourselves as it were. And it's coming back to haunt us a little bit by kind of breaking up our natural communities

in the way we have. So my advice is simply, the best thing you can do is join a hobby club. If churches are fine, if that's what you wanna do, but in general, finding places to meet people in a comfortable kind of environment is the key. And those are kind of environments that mostly provided by things like hobby clubs,

you know, singing groups, theater groups, whatever, hiking groups, any of these things, provide you with just an opportunity to meet people. And that's really the best way to do it, I think. The other advice I've heard is that if you're feeling isolated or lonely volunteering is a great antidote. Yes, yes, absolutely so. And that's kind of what I was really meaning by these hobby type social groupings as

it were, you know, sort of volunteering is a great. Because you then put into a group of people because to make friends requires time. It requires one estimate from one study so it requires something in the order of 200 hours of face to face interaction with somebody over a period of several months to turn a stranger into a reasonably good friend, probably not your best friend ever, but certainly a close friend.

And that's a very, very heavy investment that you have to make. The amount of time that's required means you have to be in a position to have a reason to see them that frequently. And having a hobby group or a club of some kind that meets regularly automatically gives you that excuse to keep turning up. And you can't force people to be friends with you. It's something that develops slowly and naturally. And you just have to give it time.

And so it's providing yourself with the opportunity to be able to spend time with somebody else. Of course, once you've built up a small group of friends, that very quickly snowballs because they will introduce you to other people. It's just getting that initial way in, if you like, that's always the difficult thing. And it can take a long time, I'm afraid, if you move to a completely new area. What's your advice about maintaining friendships once you have them? The bottom line on that is just keep seeing them. You've got to make excuses to keep seeing them,

but be very careful, don't overdo it. There's an optimum frequency, which you should see friends, to keep that relationship taking over. And that frequency is very specific to the layer that they sit in and therefore the quality of the relationship that you have with them. If you overdo it and you're trading on their toes with respect to their relationships, because remember, it's all very well you wanting to be friends with somebody, but they already have other friends who they are committed to. So in order to be your friend, they have to be willing to sacrifice one of their existing friends in some way, unless they happen to be in the same position as you and of not having any friends at the moment.

But most people obviously are embedded in existing social networks. So you have to kind of, I would say, prize them out of it exactly, but you have to persuade them that you are more interesting as a friend than the other friends they have. And that's a judgment they will make. They have to sort of go, oh well, yes, so maybe I'd like to spend more time with you.

So it's kind of, the subtleties of getting this balance right where the complications of the social world really lie. What has your research told you about the viability of friendships across gender lines? They work okay, but it's not as easy as I think everybody would like to suppose and that seems to go back to a very consistent finding that we've found and indeed other people have found but it kind of caught us a little bit left field we hadn't really expected it I didn't think and that is that the two sexes seem to live in quite different social worlds

otherwise their social dynamics are very different the way they manage relationships and the way they create and maintain relationships are very different. For women, it's very much about engaging on a one-to-one basis, very much more intimate in that sense, and it's often based around conversation, or indeed, let's put it this way, conversation plays a much stronger role in the creation of maintenance of women's friendships.

That is the case. Men's friendships tend to be more diffuse, some more casual, a little bit here today and gone tomorrow. And they tend to be activity based. So they're kind of more associated with clubs, if you like to think of it in those terms. A bunch of guys that do stuff together, might be hiking, might be just sitting around,

having a beer in the garden together on a regular basis. But the conversation is much, much less important in that respect for men. And then one of the consequences of this that you see, well, it's actually another consequence of the way, the feature of the way our social world is organized. So the sociologist who first discovered it, but a lot of people have been working on this since, including ourselves, that have discovered that the single most important feature of what makes

good friends is this thing known as homophilies, essentially meaning the love of the same. In other words, similarity, friends tend to resemble each other, all sorts of dimensions. Many of them are just cultural, your likes and dislikes, the beliefs you have about the world and so on, but also on features like personality, say, by and large, extroverts tend to cluster together, introverts tend to cluster together separately, and gender is one of those. So around 70-75% of women's social networks say the 150 meaningful relationships consist of women and 70-75% of men's social networks consist of men. That figure remains absolutely constant from the age of five to the age of 85 doesn't seem to budget all. And of course, ironically, the other 25% of opposite sex friends and family in this relationship turned out mostly

to be your family whom you have no choice over you. You're stuck with it. If you like, the ones you choose, there's this very strong tendency for the sexes to segregate. We really see this very strongly. If you watch people in conversations, sort of reception or some sort of free-flowing social event like that, you know, a yard party or something. Just watch what happens and you'll see very quickly by and large the men will sort of gather together in the little groups of men and the women will gather together in the little groups of women. And it's partly because they're interests differ. And partly because the dynamics of how they manage conversations, it's very different. And you know, it's kind of just

easier to create and maintain friendships with, you know, people who are more similar to you, I people with the same, same gender. This's not to say that you can't have friends across the sexes, but it's much rarer than people probably think. So women have this phenomenon called a best friend forever. It's a sort of almost a foreign concept to guys. It definitely not in the,

I mean, a guy can have a best mate as it were that he does stuff with, but it doesn't have the intensity of the relationship that women's best friends forever have. If you look at who these best friends forever are, 85% of them are another woman, so only 15% of them are a man. Here's one of the striking contrasts is that in the case of men, they either have a romantic partner or they have a best friend as they were who the case of men, they either have a romantic part in that or they have a best friend, as they were, who they do stuff with. They don't have both, typically,

whereas the women will invariably have both a best, a female best friend forever and a romantic part. So sometimes I have to confess, I wonder how on earth the social world and particularly the world of romance works at all when you've got two groups of people who Operating a different way if you like the short answer is of course women are much much more flexible and adaptable And this was like it's kind of not 100% comfortable from their point of view I guess but they're much better at adapting to male styles of conversation or to fit in with a man than men seem to be able to do in reverse. So, you know, the world

is kept going by the by the girls completely. I'm ready to believe that. Let's talk about gossip. The term generally has a negative connotation, but you have a bit of a different view. Can you hold forth on that? Yeah, in one sense, this is how I sort of first became interested in this whole issue of friendships, is the possible role of language in allowing us to gossip. And by gossip, I kind of mean just hanging out over the yard fence, really, having a kind of passing time with a neighbor, perhaps not having a very deep or meaningful conversation

necessarily, but spending time with someone. And I tend to see it as, really, it's this kind of declaration of as I'd rather be here hanging out with you than down the road hanging out with Jim. So it's an indication of my commitment to you as an individual. This is kind of interesting because you then always get, oh, well, listen, gossip, generally bad,

and we don't like it, and people are horrid, and the things they say to each other. This is, of course, perfectly true. But actually, the original meaning of the term gossip, going back to its Anglo-Saxon roots is God's Sib, so it's the peer group equivalent of God parents, so it's what you did with the people who are unrelated to you, but in your peer group, your friends, in other words, and this sort of then got transmuted into gossip, gossiping is what you're doing with your

God sips. And in that sense, it's a very positive thing because it's sort of at the underpinnings of keeping relationships going as it were. But of course, nothing comes to free in life. So anything that biology invents, if you like, you'll always get end up being used for negative purposes as well because we also compete with each other. and then you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know's dreadful, you know, you'll end up paying for everything night after night after night or whatever, is kind of almost an inevitable consequence, I think, sort of a negative propaganda is a natural outcome of having anything that's designed to provide positive propaganda, which is what it kind of in effect was originally

useful. So the bottom line here is that, you know, gossip is to be understood really in terms of simply the stuff we do in terms of using language where we're hanging out with people and sometimes we can use that maliciously or to our particular advantage. But, you know, we're not fools at the rest of the population. They know when people, most of the time, know

when people are using gossip in a malicious way. And people are not happy with malicious gossipers, so using negative gossipers. People tend to get who use negative gossip a lot, a lot tend to get kind of ostracized because basically you can't trust them and what really underpins friendships and relationships in general is trust and if you lose trust in somebody because you don't know what they're going to say behind your back then your relationships are not going to work so you will pull out. So malicious gossipers, you know, it's a short-term strategy, it doesn't work in the long run. And of course, it's very destructive for the community, because it kind of interferes with the natural flow of relationships around the community and tends to cause communities to fragment.

I come out of the Buddhist background and in Buddhism, there's a concept of right speech or why speech. And then there's also the great term, Sampa Palapa, or Sampa Palapa, I don't know how the best way to pronounce it, but anyway, you get to say, it basically translates into useless speech, but it sounds like your, again, sort of broad understanding of gossip

doesn't necessarily contradict the kind of Buddhist conception of using speech wisely. It can be chit-chat, as long as it's not malicious or slanderous, etc. etc. Yes, exactly so. I think that's perfectly sound observation that you make. In a sense, this idea of completely useless chitchat isn't to be encouraged either, is probably quite right. And I kind of think that language and conversation is most useful when you're establishing relationships. Once you get to know somebody

well, and of course, high-spirited is the sort of comes in in long-term partnerships, is you actually don't need to talk a great deal because you kind of know exactly how the person is going to act or what it is that they want or believe without necessarily having to discuss it at great length. So, you know, conversation is necessary and good for building relationships, but it becomes increasingly less necessary. So, I have this kind of, always this picture in my mind is way back in the 70s, probably 80s. There was a lovely photograph of two old Greek men sitting in the sun outside of Tavernor on some Greek island somewhere.

So sitting outside of the table and just not saying a word. But occasionally taking a sip of their coffee or perhaps a sip of their ruso. And I always say, this is guys bonding. They know each other for life. They don't need to have to discuss the trivia of life. They don't need to have to discuss the great things of life. They can just enjoy each other's company. And I guess that really is that second, but it's framework there. You mentioned before getting interested in friends and friendship. I take that to be an indication of the fact that you didn't start your academic career to look at this subject.

You kind of got there in a roundabout way. Oh, a very roundabout way. Actually, I started out attempting to be a philosopher, which is I thought the only interesting thing one could ever study. So I went to university to study that, but it just happened where I went to university, you couldn't do that on its own. So I chose to do it in the end in combination with psychology, which I took as the least bad option really of those available to me. But it turned out to be a kind of lucky break because it introduced me to the sciences and the proper sense, which I would never have done elsewhere. I often think if I'd gone any other university, I'd adjust on pure philosophy, and I would now be a very bad secondhand car salesman, some high-spec.

So this was my first lucky break in life. But what psychology introduced me to is two things actually, of course one was in those days you couldn't study psychology at high school, so I knew nothing about the subject really at all. But it introduced me to kind of the brain and the inner workings of the mind, if you like, and serious neuroscience and the like, on the one hand and that whole gamut of the various sub-discuits, psychology, but also we were taught animal behavior and esology by Nicot Timber can actually the great Nobel Prize winner and his zoology lecturers. And that introduced me to our own behaviour which would not have happened if I had gone

anywhere else probably to do even psychology. And that took me off to study monkeys in the wild. And then if you live among monkeys you start to get interested in their social world because it's so complex and so human like and really as many people will tell you this, who've studied monkeys in the world and it's very much like watching a saipa, oh indeed watching friends, the TV program. And you know, you start getting interested in this very complex social world, and in the end that sort of took me off to be interested in how the human social world works. And at the end of the day, I've come to the realisation, actually, the human social world is the most complex thing in the universe.

It's much more complicated than anything that astronomers do, physicists do really, because it's so unpredictable. The social world is so complicated and so dynamic, you know, there are no simple rules. And this reflects the fact, I think, that it takes us about 25 years to learn the social skills needed to handle this complex social world. So, as a generality, the length of time, the developmental periods of the period in which you're a juvenile and subadult in monkeys and apes correlates with the size and complexity of their social groups and their brains.

And the same is true of humans. We have such a big social group and such a big brain that actually takes the first 25 years of life to kind of put the software in. And you have to have the computer in order to do all the calculations if you like, but the computer on its own, as with all computers, doesn't come pre-programmed because the world is so complex. You couldn't pre-program all the social possibilities that you might ever meet. You have to have an organism, indeed, that's the whole point of having a big brain. You have to be able to sort of treat each circumstances. You come across it individually and work out from general principles,

what's the best way to behave. Now, it really does take, it seems, 25 years to do that. We've shown that with brain scanning studies, for example, that around the mid-20s, how you handle process visual cues in particular, if emotions, for example, so as to interpret what the other person is feeling, get switched from the front end of your brain where you think about things consciously, down into the lower reaches where things are automated and you don't have to think so deeply about them, which made me widely observe in the paper we published on this, as this probably explains why teenagers struggle so much with their relationships, because they're cranking out every detail. Whereas, you know, once you're adult, of course, we never become completely skilled.

It's just too much to expect, but we're sufficiently skilled that we can kind of automate a lot of a lot of the detail and cope much better with the complexities and ups and downs of the social world. And you contrast that with, with say, learning language skills and five-year-old child is pretty much at adult levels in terms of the basics of language. You know, they understand pretty much structure sentences perfectly grammatically well. They get the odd thing wrong, the odd past tense wrong and things like that. And sure, they acquire much bigger vocabulary during the rest of the childhood and teenage years. And they can learn how to structure much more complex sentences that can tell much more complicated stories, if you like.

But they're basic understanding of the principles of grammar and how to converse with people is pretty much a dull level by the age of five. And the age of five, you've still got another 20 years of learning how to cope with this impossibly complicated social world in which you have to live as an adult. Professor Dunbar, before I let you go, can you please

plug your latest book and any other books and places on the internet where we can find you and learn a more about you? Oh, well, my first book, a lot of people still like actually, is Grueming Gossip and the Evolution of Language, which was published heavens 25 years ago, almost another world away. That was kind of fun to do and it's still widely available. Another kind of later one on The Science of Love, which was published probably about 2014, something like that. But the one that's just come out, which kind of puts all of this stuff together and particularly the old research over the last 25 years, really and tries to put it all together in one place and show how it's all interconnected. It's the book that's just come out in Europe anyway,

called Friends Understanding the Power of our most important relationships. It's due to be published in the US in January, I believe it is, by Little Brown. But I'm sure you can buy digital versions of it in all good digital book shops close to you in the meantime. Professor, it's been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit here, but your work. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me on. It's been great fun. Thank you to Rob and Dunbar, great conversation. Before we head out, let me just mention again, the Ted Lasso Challenge. It starts on Tuesday, September 7th,

over on the 10% happier app. Just download it, the app that is, wherever you get your apps. And another way to, of course, get ready is to check out season two of Ted Lasso, which is airing right now. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere,

Justine Davey, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poient with audio engineering from ultraviolet audio, special shout out to Kim Baikama, who's no longer with us, but did a great job in her brief tenure here on the TPH podcast, and I should say she is the one who brought Rob and Dunbar to our attention. So big thank you to Kim.

And as always, a shout out to Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan from ABC News. We'll see you all on Wednesday with Madupa Akinola who's gonna talk about optimizing stress. She's an incredible professor from Columbia University. She's been on the show before and she's got a lot to say, especially about stress during the pandemic and stress that might come up when you're talking about diversity issues.

That's on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.