Corona Daily 112: Your Social Network

Dr Sheldon Cohen is a professor of psychology at Carnegie-Mellon. His specialization is studying the link between social ties and health. When the pandemic and the lockdown began, he looked at his phone. Out of the 800 contacts, he made a shortlist of 50, and ranked them according to how often he would like to interact with whom. The ranking was based on how meaningful the person was to him.

Not everyone is as systematic as Dr Cohen, but social circles are shrinking for all of us, says writer Kate Murphy in the NYT.

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Friend is a loosely used term, particularly since the birth of social media. There are people who don’t recognize their own friends from the Facebook list. Some people collect friends like my generation collected postal stamps in childhood, for eg0 satisfaction and show-off.

Certainly, in the before-mask era, we interacted with hundreds of people. Ten years ago, I went to a gym every morning, learnt ballroom dancing in the evenings, attended a writer’s club and a readers’ club every month, and socialized every Sunday with my fellow marathon runners. My life was exhausting and full of people. Now, ten years later, I am in touch with very few of those hundreds of “friends”. Most of them were activity friends – the activity over, the friendship was over.

Similarly, last few years, whenever my daughter’s school summoned us, I met the other school parents. Every now and then, we had a parents’ get-together over lunch. Since last March, my daughter’s school has been online. I have not met a single parent from the school. I am not a WhatsApp person, so that interaction is completely severed. It was situational and superficial.

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In a study, a psychologist Robin Dunbar claimed that human beings have the cognitive capacity to accommodate four to six close friends. That’s all. It is the top tier of your social network with whom you have a daily or weekly interaction.

Regular contact is important. Without that, friends can get demoted to acquaintances. Another study found that every five to seven years, we replace as much as half of our social network. Social networking is a zero-sum game. When we add a friend, another one drops out. (Of course, one may forward a message to 100 people. I don’t think belonging to a WhatsApp group by itself constitutes friendship).

The pandemic is clarifying whom we really like and dropping those with whom our relations were situational, convenient or superficial. A major reason for discontinuing relationships is the lack of meeting opportunities.

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Friendship is not always reciprocal. One study asked 84 undergraduates to score others on a 0-5 scale: I don’t know this person (0)/ friend (3)/ one of my best friends (5). They were also asked to “predict” the scores of others about them. The conclusion was that almost 50% of the friendships were not reciprocal. Only when both identified each other as “friend” (3 or above), the friendship was considered reciprocal. In Bollywood films and in real life, many of us have experienced this with love. The person we fall (deeply) in love with falls (even more deeply) in love with someone else.

It hurts our ego to accept the possibility that some of our close friends may not feel as close to us as we to them.

The pandemic year offers an acid test. If you consider someone a close friend or one of your best friends, and have had no contact with that person for a whole year, you may have been mistaken.

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Unlike Dr Cohen who made the short list at the beginning, we can now evaluate our true close social circle. If what the cognitive psychologists say is true and we can have only a handful of close friends, the pandemic has probably given us enough evidence to know who they are.

Ravi