Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Jeffrey Hall,

One reason for this might be that women share more interests in common with other women than they do with men, and vice versa, making the flow of the conversation easier to maintain with fewer pregnant pauses while people try and think of something to say.

The negative observation has been just how poorly applications like Zoom and Skype actually work for large social groups. It is only really possible for one person to speak at a time, so it tends to default into a bit of a lecture.

Monica Whitty examined the traits that make victims vulnerable. She found that around two-thirds of victims are women. They tend to be middle-aged, to score high on impulsivity and sensation-seeking, to be less kind but at the same time more trusting, and to have an addictive personality (which is likely to make them more clingy).

What we don’t know is whether the size of your brain determines how many friends you can have or whether the number of friends you have determines the size of your brain.

sets of three subgroups who all ‘like’ each other give the social group structural stability and resilience in the face of external attack.

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.

ecological problems are solved by living in a group,

When people move away and don’t have the opportunity to meet up so often, friendships seem to flag surprisingly quickly.