Book Review: Friends by Robin Dunbar
With the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been spending more time by ourselves and less time socialising. As such, it made me quite interested in understanding more about friendships: Do we need friends? How many friends can one have? How do friendships change as we grow older? Are the friends we make online the same as those we make physically? In this book by Robin Dunbar, I managed to find some of the answers.
Dunbar’s number
Does the name sound familiar? Well that’s because the author himself was the one who discovered it! Dunbar’s Number is essentially a physical upper bound on the number of friends that one can have. Due to constraints such as our brain capacity and time, most people can have up to 150 friends with varying levels of intimacy. In fact, we most likely have only 5 close friends at any one point of time.
The author delves deep into the research he conducted on this topic, which can get quite technical. This is a common theme throughout the book, it is very academic and the author draws most of his examples from research papers. Something to take note of when considering to get this book!
Mentalising
The ability to understand what someone else is thinking, how they see the world as opposed to how you see the world. This allows us to see the effects of our actions on the friend it is directed to, which helps us decide whether we should be doing/saying something to that person to maintain the friendship. This also scales up very quickly with our complex social networks. At times, we are required to think about how this action affects the friends of our friends and more. For that, high-order mentalising skills are required.
I think this is quite an important and applicable takeaway from this book. It is important to consider how your actions will affect your friendship / the dynamics within a group. Everyone has this ability, but some are better at it. Those who are will be able to build stronger, longer-lasting friendships.
Birds of a feather flock together
Have you wondered why you often have similar mindsets / thoughts as your friends? While it may seems like being friends is the cause for the similarity, Dunbar explains that the converse is true instead — you become friends because you think alike. This tendency is known as homophily, and is a dominant feature in our friendships and romantic relationships.
Dunbar proposes the Seven Pillars of Friendship, which are a set of cultural dimensions that we use to evaluate someone’s friendship potential. The seven pillars are:
- having the same language / dialect
- growing up in the same location
- having the same educational and career experiences
- having the same hobbies and interests
- having the same world view (moral, religious, political)
- having the same sense of humour
- having the same musical tastes
Conclusion
While the above three concepts are my main takeaways from the book, there are a couple others that I found interesting, such as the limitations of language in communicate our feelings / to connect with larger audiences. However, there were some parts of the book that I felt disappointed in, such as the chapter on relationships and the fact that there was no conclusion to the book.
Overall, I found the book slightly difficult to get through given the academic oriented writing style. After a few chapters in, I was merely skimming through the examples. Nevertheless, if you enjoy books that delves into how our biological characteristics affects friendships, or more academic books in general, this would be a good one to pick up!
