Social Connections
Count your close friends, regular friends and acquaintances and see how the numbers compare. Average is about 5 close friends, 15 regular ones and 80 acquaintances. Dunbar's ceiling is around 150.
More close friends than
50%
of people. The 2021 American survey found a mean of about 5 close friends, and 12% of adults reporting none.
Your network vs. Dunbar's layers
Close friend distribution (support clique)
Dunbar capacity used
The three layers add up to 100 people, which is 67% of Dunbar's 150, the number of people he estimated a human brain can keep track of as individuals.
How we compare: normal curves with means 5, 15 and 80 and SDs 2, 5 and 25, our fit to Dunbar's layer sizes and the 2021 American Perspectives Survey. Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010) pooled 148 studies and found strong social ties linked to about 50% better odds of survival over the study periods, an effect in the same range as quitting smoking. Correlation, with the usual caveats.
In context
Robin Dunbar got to 150 by plotting neocortex size against group size across primates and extending the line to humans. Chimpanzee troops run about 55. The same number keeps turning up in Roman centuries, Hutterite colonies, Christmas card lists and the size of a village in the Domesday Book, though a 2021 reanalysis by Lindenfors and colleagues put the confidence interval anywhere from 2 to 520, which is a polite way of saying it is a rule of thumb.
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About this test
Count your close friends, regular friends and acquaintances. The module compares each layer to Dunbar's layered model of social networks (Dunbar 1992, 1998) and the Survey Center on American Life (2021): about 5 close friends (SD 2), 15 regular friends (SD 5) and 80 acquaintances (SD 25), with a ceiling near 150.
Close friends is the headline number. Three close friends is around the 16th percentile, five is average, eight is the 93rd. The 2021 American survey found 12% of adults reporting no close friends at all, up from 3% in 1990.
How many close friends does the average person have?
About five, by the Dunbar layer the module uses, with an SD of 2. In the 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 49% of adults reported three or fewer close friends. The numbers have been falling since 1990.
What is Dunbar's number?
150: the number of stable relationships a person can maintain, proposed by Robin Dunbar in 1992 from the ratio of neocortex size to group size in primates. Inside it sit layers of roughly 5, 15, 50 and 150. The module's acquaintance layer uses a mean of 80.
Is it normal to have no close friends?
Uncommon but not rare: 12% of American adults said so in 2021. Zero is about the 0.6th percentile on the module's curve (mean 5, SD 2), which is the normal approximation misbehaving at the edge; the survey figure is the better guide.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Social Connections module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.