New study: Most Facebook friends are “fake” – Dagbladet.no

(Dagbladet): Have you ever wondered whether your Facebook friends care about you in the real world?

The answer is most likely no, a new study shows, according to The Independent.

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University have examined the relationship between Facebook friends and what we can call real friends.

The conclusion is that very few of the people we are friends with on Facebook are “real” friends.

The people Dunbar has researched have averaged about 150 friends on Facebook. Nevertheless, there are only 14 of them expressing sympathy if something has gone wrong.

The average person in the study says that only 27 percent of Facebook friends were real friends.

These figures can largely be transferred to life outside the virtual world, where you have more acquaintances than had been close friends. But friends list on Facebook, can fool us into believing that we have flære close friends than we really have, writes the British newspaper.

Dunbar has also concluded that we apparently do not use social media to expand your social circle spring, but that we use them as a means of maintenance friendship when we do not have the opportunity to meet face to face.