Guess What? Your Facebook Friends Do Care About You For Real, At Least One In Four Does!

An Oxford researcher has found out that strong bonds between Facebook friends and how it correlates to real-life friendships are nothing like each other. According to a report, Professor of Evolutionary Robin Dunbar found out that an average person has about 150 Facebook friends but only about 14 of those would really sympathise when something goes wrong.

The report by Independent said that those numbers are mostly similar to how friendships work in real life. It went on to say that a huge number of those supposed friends on a friend list means that some people might be tricked into thinking that they have more close friends than they really have.

Dunbar noted that Facebook friends come in different circles with about five people in a user's inner circle who are their closest friends, meaning these are the real friends who they interact with not just through a computer but in real life as well. The level next to this five-friend circle is the 15 people who share something of a close bond. The next level would be a group of 50, then 150 different friends.

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. In practical terms, it reflects that opposed to casual relationships, real relationships require at least an occasional face-to-face interaction to maintain it.

These findings might not surprise users who have been on Facebook a lot. The social network may have the incredible ability to bring people together, but by doing so, it tends to spread plenty of "fake-ness" too. This can be noticed on shallow forward posts seeking likes for sappy pictures and hoaxes that continuously circulate the social media.

The study by Professor Dunbar is not the first one to hit on the problems posed by these so-called Facebook friends. It could be recalled that a study by University of Michigan researchers in 2013 showed that Facebook can actually provide life dissatisfaction to its users.

It was reported in the Daily Mail that the research was backed by 82 participants who were text messaged five times in a day for a two-week period. The text message was linked to an online survey about their use of the social media giant, their feelings and the amount of real face-to-face interaction that they engage in. With these studies, it leads to a conclusion that not only are users' Facebook friends fake but that they could also make them unhappy.