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

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Friendship might not necessarily be something you’ve considered to be an urgent psychological and physiological issue. On this show, we spend a lot of time exploring how the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives and our health. Sadly, in many ways, it’s harder than ever to make and keep friends.  With loneliness and disconnection on the rise, it’s clear that 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.  Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/robin-dunbar-372 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% Happier early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. 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 wrongheaded, 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 relationships determines the quality of your life. I picked that expression up from the great psychotherapist Esther Perel, 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 inface, 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 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 airs on Apple TV+. 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 that show, that'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 ensues. 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 and only Sharon Salzberg. 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 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 on 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 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 going to 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 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. 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 gotten 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 in 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're 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, absolutely so. And that's, if you like, a perfectly reasonable thing to have God or Jesus or, you know, the Virgin Mary, if you're a Catholic, perhaps. Or indeed, I really am 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. But I'm sure she felt that he was very much in her circle.

Maybe not the closest friend she ever had, but, you know, he sat there and she saw him every night on TV news, the anchor, and, you know, she said goodnight 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 the 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 out of 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, you know, huge cities with 10s of millions of people. And I thought, you know, 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 up many more people on Facebook than that, but they tend to fall into the category of acquaintances. And of

course, we have acquaintances in real life too. We work with a lot of these people. We'd go out and we'd have a beer 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 Dunbar'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 prior to 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 you a 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. Yes. 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, you know, when your world falls apart, they will drop everything to come and pick you up again. And 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, count as acquaintances, you know them well. Again, as I say, you work with probably a lot of them, might include the kind of barista you buy, or you used to buy your latte coffee from on the way to work. And you perhaps pass the time of day and had a brief chat with them. But then 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 5000 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 layer just inside that of photographs you could put name to will include all sorts of people that you don't really have a meaningful relationship with. So for all of us, for better or for worse, Donald Trump sits in there because we've seen him so often on television. Probably the Queen of England 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 bulge under his left armpit would hustle

you away rather quickly. Let's just go back to the close friendships. And I want to stress again, that 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 going to 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 a relationship with, of course, that is going to include your mom, and it's going to include your romantic partner, and your granny, and as well as your more conventional friends. But these numbers seem 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 you once knew, 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, you know, they're meeting lots of new people. So we reckon there's about a 30% turnover in the position of friends in their social networks every year. And it's true of kind 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 of somebody because we're seeing more of somebody else. And we feel more engaged with a new person, they fit better with 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 one 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 telephoned 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, you know, 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 who come on this show are pretty anti, not anti, but, you know, 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 as you they try and keep it going through telephone calls and social media and so on. whether they might not be better finding a new shoulder to cry on just around the corner, as it were, whom they, you know, when their world falls apart, they can walk around the block and 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 I have, as it were, and you can help me. You know, that physical access, as it were, face-to-face access 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 on 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. Uh-huh. So that puts you in your generation. Well, when you used the word old before, I felt like I was, you know, I'm comfortable being lumped in there.

I mean, I just got my AARP card the other day, so I'm good to go. Join the club. So I'll just go back to this five number, or I think it may be four to six, but whatever for close friends. So if I. Have 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, brother who has a wife and six children, does that mean like one of the kids is not going to make it, make the cut? And does that mean like I can't get into my brother's inner circle? Wow, I couldn't possibly comment. 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 inner core consists of 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. And 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 circle because they're not thrown very far. I mean, they just shift over into the next layer, as 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 aren't getting 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 spider's 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, you know, a year or two down the line. There's a way in which, to some ears, this discussion of friendship could sound

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 and that the quality of your friendships really will dictate 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 friendly neighborhood 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 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 kind of things certainly have an effect on your health and well-being, 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 it 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, is a major issue. And this is for older people, is simply either having around four to five good friends, or engaging in roundabout three voluntary activities. So you can compensate. So by voluntary activities, I mean doing things like, 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 you're 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. You 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, you know, 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've got time. It goes back to our sort of origins, as it were, as a member of the primate, the monkey and ape zoological family. The big evolutionary development that monkeys and apes, if you like, invented as a way of coping with the difficulty of successfully surviving and reproducing in the world was the formation of bonded relationships and bonded social groups. So they clubbed 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 savannah 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 primate 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 unawares by a predator. But the problem is by living in close proximity, it's very stressful. As we know, we 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. This is 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 and apes do it. I believe you've also written, you know, 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 a major part of the brain's pain management system in fact the the name endorphin is a contraction of endogenous morphine because chemically they're very closely related to morphine but because the body's 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 we 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 comfortableness and trust and bondedness when we do things with somebody

else that releases endorphins. Now, in monkeys and apes, that's social grooming. We have a highly specialized neural system that runs some 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 at 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 up. If you put somebody in a brain scanner, we can see the brain firing or the brain's endorphin receptors firing up when we're stroked very gently on the torso, for example, in 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 a touch-based system is it's just its intimacy. You know, you sort of don't 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 sub-stories. 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, singing 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 do in church or many other religious services of various religions.

Much more of my conversation with Robin Dunbar right after this. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place. When you're away, you could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. I personally love Airbnbs. My friend Glenn and I just rented an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale.

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Check out Audible Canadian Originals, including The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. I have a million questions on sort of 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 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 of them more time so that the relationships are more robust. Extroverts prefer to have fewer friends and give each of them more time so that the relationships are 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 you know some of us

prefer to have fewer friends perhaps a little more asocial in that sense. Other people really like to 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, 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, there will come a time in the end, I think, when loneliness will hit you and it will have serious psychological and physical consequences. And 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 you know they're not up to going clubbing or playing a round of golf or whatever it is just physically so they don't get out they don't have the opportunity to meet people anymore and they end up with smaller and smaller social networks and become intensely lonely and depressed and fall 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. You know, 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 extroversion and introversion, because I mean, I have a little of both, but I probably leaned 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 religious services of one religion or another to bring people into trance states. So there's some suggestion here that going into trance involves the release of a massive endorphin surge, which is why you get this feeling of relaxation and calmness and all,

you know, peace with the world and the world is wonderful and so on that you get from going into trance 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, more controlled way that often involves control over breathing.

And this harks back a little bit to the role of singing in bringing on this sense of camaraderie and so on that we get in the icebreaker 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 endorphin producing effects, you can do it on your own. And I dare to suggest that if you like to put it this way, on these endorphin producing effects, you can do it on your own. And I dare to suggest that if you walk past a 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 an endorphin 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 you know it does seem to be remarkable just sort of and it's physical activity will do it that's'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 effect dramatically, absolutely dramatically. Something about doing something like singing or laughing or physical exercise, even say jogging in a group rather than on your own.

All these things ramp up the endorphin effect and give you a much bigger hit, 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, look, I, 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, the people out there who just feel like, you know, maybe I moved 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 100 years or so, probably a great deal less than that, even, you know, people who spent most of their life, you know, 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 increasing 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 uh for

most people you know there are two major choices one is where you work uh because you know 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 uh or whatever temple type communities you get 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.

And, of course, we're kind of sometimes nervous of doing that, perhaps for a good reason. And so, you know, 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 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. Churches are fine if that's what you want to do.

But in general, finding places to meet people in a comfortable kind of environment is the key. And those kind of environments are 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 kind of hobby type social groupings, as it were. You know, sort of volunteering is a great one because you're then put into a group people, because to make friends requires time. It requires, well, one estimate from one study, 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, you know, having a hobby group or a club of some kind that meets regularly automatically gives you that excuse to keep turning up. And, you know, you can't force people to be friends with you.

It's something that develops slowly and naturally. 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 at which you should see friends to keep that relationship ticking over. And that frequency is very specific to the layer that they sit in and therefore 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 treading 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're 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 wouldn't say prize them out of it exactly, but you have to persuade them that you're more interesting as a friend than the other friends they have. And that's a judgment they will make, you know, they have to sort of go, oh, well, yes, 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 don't think. And that is that the two sexes seem to live in quite different social worlds. In other words, 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. It's 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 and maintenance of women's friendships than is the case for men. Men's friendships tend to be more diffused and more casual, a little bit here today and gone tomorrow, and they tend to be more diffused and 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. It's a bunch of guys that do stuff together.

It might be hiking. It 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 was actually another consequence of the way feature of the way our social world is organized so the sociologists 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 homophily. It's essentially meaning the love of the same. In other words, similarity. Friends tend to resemble each other on 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. So 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, let's say the 150 meaningful relationships, consist of women, and 70-75% of men's social networks consist of men. And that figure remains absolutely constant from the age of five to the age of 85. It doesn't seem to budge at all. And of course, ironically, the other 25 percent of opposite sex friends and family in this relationship turn out mostly to be your family whom you have no choice over you you're

stuck with if you like the ones who 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 at a reception or some sort of free-flowing social event like that, a yard party or something, just watch what happens. And you'll see very quickly, by and large, the men will sort of all gather together in little groups of men, and the women will gather together in little groups of women. And it's partly because their interests differ and partly because the dynamics of how they manage conversations is 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, people of the same, same gender. This is 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 you um it's a sort of almost a foreign concept to to guys 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. It's 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 it were, who they do stuff with. They don't have both, typically, whereas the women will invariably have both a female best friend forever and a romantic partner. 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 operate in a different way if you like the short answer is of course women are much much more flexible and adaptable in this respect 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 in order 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 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, you know, perhaps not having a very deep or meaningful conversation necessarily, but, you know, spending time with somebody. And I tended to see it as really, it's this kind of declaration of, I'd rather be here hanging out with you than down the road hanging out with Jim, you know. 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, isn't gossip generally bad and we don't like it and people are horrid in 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-Sib. So it's the peer group equivalent of a God-parent. 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 were doing with your God- god sibs. And in that sense, it's a very positive thing because it's sort of the underpinnings of keeping relationships going, as it were. But of course, nothing comes for free in life. So anything that biology invents, if you like, can always end up being used for negative purposes as well, because we also compete with each other. So using language and conversation to kind of try and persuade somebody to be your friend rather than somebody else's friend by kind of saying, you know, don't go out with Jim, he'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 it's sort of uh 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 used for so the bottom line here is that you you know, gossip is to be understood really in terms of simply the stuff we do in terms of using language when 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, 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 gossip as it were. People tend to get, who use negative gossip 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, you know, 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. to fragment. I come out of the Buddhist background, and in Buddhism, there's a concept of right speech or wise speech. And then there's also this great term, sampapalapa, or sampapalapa, 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. And I think that that's a perfectly sound observation that you make. And in a sense, you know, this sort of idea of completely useless chit chat 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, I suppose this 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 a taverna on some greek island somewhere so sitting either side of the table and just not saying a word but occasionally taking a sip of their coffee or perhaps a sip of their ruso uh and i always say, this is guys bonding. They've known 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 Buddhist 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 out attempting to be a philosopher, which I thought the only interesting thing one could ever study. So I went to university to study that. But it just so happened that 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 in the proper sense, which I would never have done elsewhere. I often think if I'd gone any other university,

I'd have just done pure philosophy, and I would now be a very bad second-hand car salesman somehow, I suspect. 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 various sub-disciplines of psychology. But also, we were taught animal behavior and ethology by Nico Timberg, and actually the great Nobel Prize winner, and his zoology lecturers. And that introduced me to animal behavior, which would, you know, would not have happened if I'd gone anywhere else, probably to do even psychology. And that took me off to study monkeys in the wild. And then, you know, 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 wild, it's very much like watching a soap opera.

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 kind of be interested in how the human social world works. And at the end of the day, I've come to the realization that actually, you know, the human social world is the most complex thing in the universe. It's much more complicated than anything that astronomers or physicists do, really, because it's so unpredictable. The social world is so complicated and so dynamic.

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, so 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. I mean, 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-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 treat each circumstance as 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 of emotions, for example, so as to interpret what the other person is feeling, gets 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 rightly observe in the paper we published on this, probably explains

why teenagers struggle so much with their relationships, because they're cranking out every detail. Whereas, you know, once you're an adult, of course, we never become completely skilled. This is too much to expect, but we're sufficiently skilled that we can kind of automate 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, say, learning language skills. A five-year-old child is pretty much at adult levels in terms of the basics of language. They can 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 their childhood and teenage

years. And they can, you know, learn how to structure much more complex sentences, they can tell much more complicated stories, if you like. But their basic understanding of the principles of grammar and how to converse with people is, you know, pretty much adult level by the age of five. And at 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 more about you?

Oh, well, my first book that a lot of people still like, actually, is Grooming 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. 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 our research over the last 25 years, really, 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 bookshops close to you in the meantime. Professor, it's been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit and to hear about your work. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me on.

It's been great fun. Thank you to Robin 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 Kashmir, Justine Davey, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poyant 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 Robin Dunbar to our attention. So big thank you to Kim. And as always, a shout out to Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan from ABC News. We'll see you all on Wednesday with Madhupa Akinnola, who's going to 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. If you like 10% Happier, and I hope you do,

you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. I'm hiring, but where can I find potential candidates? Hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities are ready and eager to work. Help create an inclusive workplace that benefits everyone. Find the tools and resources to help you hire persons with disabilities at Canada.ca slash right here. A message from the government of Canada.

Today, hip hop dominates pop culture, but it wasn't always like that. And to tell the story of how that changed, I want to take you back to a very special year in rap. 88, it was too much good music. The world was on fire. I'm Will Smith. This is Class of 88, my new podcast about the moments, albums, and artists

that inspired a sonic revolution and secured 1988 as one of hip-hop's most important years. We'll talk to the people who were there. And most of all, we'll bring you some amazing stories. You know what my biggest memory from that tour is? It was your birthday. Yes, and you brought me to Sade's life-size cardboard cutout. This is Class of 88, the story of a year that changed hip-hop.

Follow Class of 88 on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.