A new Cornell University study finds that we may “friend” people on Facebook, but we have fewer real friends – the kind who would help us out in tough times, listen sympathetically no matter what, lend us money or give us a place to stay if we needed it, and keep a secret. Sociologist Matthew Brashears surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database and found that from 1985 to 2010 the number of truly close friends people cited has dropped – even though we’re socializing as much as ever. On average, participants listed 2.03 close friends in Brashears’ survey. That number was down from about three in a 1985 study. Brashears asked people to list the names of people with whom they had discussed “important matters” over the previous six months. Forty-eight percent of participants listed one close friend, 18% listed two and 29% listed more. A little more than 4% didn’t list anyone. Brashears said while his survey can’t tell conclusively, his guess is that while we meet just as many people as we used to, we categorize them differently.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Real Friends On The Decline
A new Cornell University study finds that we may “friend” people on Facebook, but we have fewer real friends – the kind who would help us out in tough times, listen sympathetically no matter what, lend us money or give us a place to stay if we needed it, and keep a secret. Sociologist Matthew Brashears surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database and found that from 1985 to 2010 the number of truly close friends people cited has dropped – even though we’re socializing as much as ever. On average, participants listed 2.03 close friends in Brashears’ survey. That number was down from about three in a 1985 study. Brashears asked people to list the names of people with whom they had discussed “important matters” over the previous six months. Forty-eight percent of participants listed one close friend, 18% listed two and 29% listed more. A little more than 4% didn’t list anyone. Brashears said while his survey can’t tell conclusively, his guess is that while we meet just as many people as we used to, we categorize them differently.
