Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Women’s conversations have a distinctively cooperative character, with frequent use of ‘back-channel’ comments (‘Yes!’, ‘Uh-huh!’, ‘You’re so right!’) given over the speaker’s statements, combined with frequent use of simultaneous endings where the listener repeats the last phrase as the speaker utters it.

community, or clan as it is known in some cases, is the group of people that share a common hunting territory and come together every year or two for ceremonies like puberty and marriage rituals.

you could afford to have only a few high-obligation friendships, but you could have many more low-obligation ones.

40 per cent of our total social time to the five people in the innermost layer, and a further 20 per cent to the 10 people that make up the rest of the next layer, the 15-layer. That is, 60 per cent of our total social effort is devoted to just 15 people.

Over the course of a month, you would devote around 520 minutes (about eight and a half hours, in effect an entire working day) to each support-clique member

Worse still, employers began to check prospective employees out on Facebook.

And that is really the point: the only way we can prevent a ‘conversation’ with more than four people breaking up into several smaller conversations is by turning it into a lecture with socially agreed rules that oblige the rest of us to maintain a respectful silence and not interrupt the speaker.

this layer is mainly populated by members of your extended family

which people in each circle contacted each other were virtually the same in all four of the datasets (face-to-face, phone calls, Facebook posts and Twitter tweets).