Why Facebook friends are worth keeping

Could the benefits of social networking be too good to miss out on?

link: Why Facebook friends are worth keeping – 07 July 2010 – New Scientist

The explosion of weak ties could have profound consequences for our social structures too, says Judith Donath of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, who studies the various ways we communicate using social media. One thing that limited the size of traditional social groups was the time it took to form reliable and trustworthy ties, she says. Online tools have changed that, helping each of us to build a social “supernet”: a network of easily accessible contacts that is bigger than any we have ever been able to manage. “It would be impossible to maintain 500 or 5000 ties without it,” she says. “We’re already seeing changes.” For example, many people now turn to their social networks ahead of sources such as newspapers or television, because their acquaintances provide them with more trusted and relevant news, information or recommendations. However, Donath believes more should be done to maintain privacy and trust in the networking tools.

But are these huge networks really that relevant to us on a personal level? Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote the book How Many Friends Does One Person Need?. In it, he argues that our primate brains place a cap on the number of genuine social relationships we can actually maintain: roughly 150. We simply don’t have the cognitive capacity or time for any more, he says.

Online social networking appears to be “very good for servicing relationships, but not for building them de novo,” says Dunbar. He argues that our evolutionary roots mean we still depend heavily on physical and face-to-face contact to be able to develop ties. Nonetheless, there is evidence that online networking can transform our daily interactions. Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, decided to test what effect sharing personal information online has on your chances of being liked. He asked participants in an experiment to try to encourage other members of the trial to like them via an instant-messaging conversation. Beforehand, some participants were allowed to view the Facebook profiles of the person they were trying to win over. He found that those with Facebook access asked questions to which they already knew the answers or raised things they had in common, and as a result were much more successful at winning people over. He concluded that people who use these sites to keep updated on the lives of their acquaintances are more likely to be liked in subsequent social interactions (Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, p 413).

Social networking may also have tangible effects on our well-being. In two studies of college students, Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues found that the frequency of Facebook use correlates with greater self-esteem. Support and affirmation from the weak ties could be the explanation, says Ellison. “Asking your friends for help or advice is nothing new, but we are seeing a lowering of barriers” among acquaintances, she says. People are readily sharing personal feelings and experiences to a wider group of people than they might once have done (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 12, p 1143).

Another way that social networking appears to be changing our social structures is through power and influence. In behaviour experiments in the laboratory, Michael Kearns at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia found hints that being better connected can give an individual apparently disproportionate influence. In one experiment with 30 volunteers, he asked people to quickly reach consensus in an online game over a choice between two colours. The participants’ only means of communication was the ability to see the colour chosen by some of the other participants. They had a minute to reach consensus, and failure to agree on a common colour meant losing a prize. The twist was that he offered different financial incentives to each participant so that they would try to persuade the group to pick one or the other colour. But some had an extra advantage: the ability to see more of the participants’ chosen colours than others.

a study by Stephanie Tom Tong of Michigan State University, and colleagues, who found that online popularity is related to your number of online friends. They asked Facebook users to rate the “social attractiveness” of the profiles of others, which differed only in the number of visible friends. The researchers found that people with about 300 friends were rated as the most appealing, any more than that and their social attractiveness began to drop off (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 13, p 531). The average number of Facebook friends is 130, according to the website’s owners, which is not too far from Dunbar’s hypothesised 150.

link: Why Facebook friends are worth keeping – 07 July 2010 – New Scientist