Your Facebook friends aren’t really your friends according to this survey

So, despite your popularity on Facebook, not as many of your Facebook friends translate into real friends that you can count on.

Dunbar says he carried out a survey to find out the connection between people have lots of Facebook friends and real friends. It found that there was little correlation between having friends on social networks and actually being able to depend on them, or even talking to them regularly.

The figures then tumbled even further when those surveyed were asked how many of those friends could be counted on in a time of need – the average was 4.

According to Professor Robert Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist, a hypothetical limit of about 150 people is all most can handle, due to limits in building relationships and time for socializing.

The survey also found that people consider only 28% of their Facebook friends to be genuine friends. Of the 150 friends, only about 14 of them would express sympathy in the event of anything going wrong.

“The numbers are similar to how friendships work in real life”, the Professor wrote in his research.

Rather than increasing people’s social circles, Dunbar suggests Facebook and other social media may function to prevent friendships “decaying” over time.

“Seeing the white of their eyes from time to time seems to be crucial to the way we maintain friendships”.

Dunbar explained that this 150 layer is the one that differentiates the people that can do you favors and towards whom you feel you have obligations from the ones that you do not have reciprocated relationships with. The average was 27.6 per cent. However, the next question was about the friends who would help them in the case of a crisis.

The study also looked at the different boundaries within friends circles on the online social media site.

Women had more friends than men (In the first sample, women averaged 166 and men just 145 friends; in the second, it was 196 vs 157), while – perhaps unsurprisingly – older generations had fewer friends than younger ones.

“There is something paramount about face-to-face interactions that is crucial for maintaining friendships”. In practical terms, it reflects that opposed to casual relationships, real relationships require at least an occasional face-to-face interaction to maintain it.

Professor Dunbar also wrote that there is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that was not overcome by the communication advantages of online media.