Study says people only have about five best friends

HOUSTONNo matter how many hundreds of friends you have on Facebook, you really have up to five best friends, according to a recent study.  

Through his research, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has discovered that our relationships with a network of people depend on our emotional connections with them. Those ties separate groups of friends into "Dunbar layers."

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There are five people in the closest layer, followed by 10, 35 and 100 in the outermost layer. 

Recently, he found stronger evidence of this by studying cell phone data in 2007, right before the rise of smartphones and social media. 

His team studied the frequency of phone calls made by 35 million individuals in Europe. 

Dunbar concluded most people have four layers for closeness of friends. In the innermost layer, people have 4.1 friends, then 6.9 in the next layer. In third layer, there are another 18.8 people, then 99.1 in the outermost layer. ​

As the layer grows, emotional closeness declines.