Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle
6. Rediscovering Connection with Friends and The Science of Connection with Dr Robin Dunbar and Shelley Ceridwen Doyle
Do you ever wonder what it takes to cultivate and maintain lasting friendships? Have you considered the profound impact of social connections on your wellbeing?
Join Shelley Ceridwen Doyle for a captivating conversation with the Head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research at the University of Oxford, Dr Robin Dunbar, the mind behind Dunbar's Number, as we explore the secrets of lasting friendship and the intriguing world of social interaction.
Robin enlightens us on the significance of having a tight-knit group of 5-15 for optimum health and happiness. Dive deep into the dynamics of friendships and uncover the profound influence of similarities in relationships.
In a world reshaped by the digital age, we question whether it has improved our ability to form and maintain authentic relationships or exacerbated feelings of loneliness.
We delve into the concept of a 'sympathy group,' the vital role of trust in relationships, and the fascinating effects of oxytocin and endorphins on bonding.
Learn about the power of shared experiences and their role in creating strong bonds. Drawing from personal stories and a wealth of social structure knowledge, we tackle the issue of loneliness in communities and discuss potential ways to combat it.
This episode was a true gift into the heart of relationships and social connections.
Delve deeper into this topic with Robin Dunbar's book:
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Little, Brown and Company (2021)
---
I hope our conversation inspires you to rediscover connection in your own life!
Subscribe now and let the magic unfold.
Love,
Shelley x
About Your Host
Hi, I'm Shelley Doyle, a Social Wealth Strategist and Connection Coach, helping remote and hybrid leaders who are struggling to retain their high performers, with tools and strategies to reconnect their distributed teams.
I also help people who move or work remotely, to elevate and sustain their social wealth, online/offline - everywhere! Discover More
I am currently working on my MA thesis, combining cutting edge research on social wellbeing and digital health, with two decades in corporate communications, to deliver mind-shifting talks, workshops, and programs around the world.
Find me at TheCommuniverse.com and on LinkedIn.
Global Workshop Tour "Beyond Screens" launches September 2024.
To hear when new episodes drop, subscribe to my weekly newsletter, or check out recent episodes.
Do you ever wonder what it takes to cultivate and maintain lasting friendships? Have you considered the profound impact of social connections on your wellbeing?
Join Shelley Ceridwen Doyle for a captivating conversation with the Head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research at the University of Oxford, Dr Robin Dunbar, the mind behind Dunbar's Number, as we explore the secrets of lasting friendship and the intriguing world of social interaction.
Robin enlightens us on the significance of having a tight-knit group of 5-15 for optimum health and happiness. Dive deep into the dynamics of friendships and uncover the profound influence of similarities in relationships.
In a world reshaped by the digital age, we question whether it has improved our ability to form and maintain authentic relationships or exacerbated feelings of loneliness.
We delve into the concept of a 'sympathy group,' the vital role of trust in relationships, and the fascinating effects of oxytocin and endorphins on bonding.
Learn about the power of shared experiences and their role in creating strong bonds. Drawing from personal stories and a wealth of social structure knowledge, we tackle the issue of loneliness in communities and discuss potential ways to combat it.
This episode was a true gift into the heart of relationships and social connections.
Delve deeper into this topic with Robin Dunbar's book:
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Little, Brown and Company (2021)
---
I hope our conversation inspires you to rediscover connection in your own life!
Subscribe now and let the magic unfold.
Love,
Shelley x
About Your Host
Hi, I'm Shelley Doyle, a Social Wealth Strategist and Connection Coach, helping remote and hybrid leaders who are struggling to retain their high performers, with tools and strategies to reconnect their distributed teams.
I also help people who move or work remotely, to elevate and sustain their social wealth, online/offline - everywhere! Discover More
I am currently working on my MA thesis, combining cutting edge research on social wellbeing and digital health, with two decades in corporate communications, to deliver mind-shifting talks, workshops, and programs around the world.
Find me at TheCommuniverse.com and on LinkedIn.
Global Workshop Tour "Beyond Screens" launches September 2024.
To hear when new episodes drop, subscribe to my weekly newsletter, or check out recent episodes.
So, in your opinion, can loneliness like the trajectory that it's been going on in recent history? Can we turn this around?
Speaker 2:The answer is yes, but my worry is that our communities are just too big, which means it won't happen easily, naturally, so we have to go out of our way to make it work.
Speaker 1:Hello, I am Shelley Keridwen and this is Rediscovering Connection, and I'm very excited today to have Mr Robin Dunbar here with me. Good morning, good afternoon, robin. How are you today?
Speaker 2:Good afternoon, at least here, and I'm very well, thank you.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, I've got up bright and early here on Vancouver Island to speak with you and I'm tremendously excited because when I found your work, it really was the missing piece in a puzzle that I've been putting together for the last two years of my own research and drawing on other people's research. Dunbar's number, which I think you're famous for, was really that tangible piece that I'm like, wow, all of this work that I've been looking at in terms of frequency that we're spending time with close and our wider spheres of social connections the numbers in there really makes it clear to me how, how possible it is, how accessible it is to kind of uplift our lives through close friends and we don't actually need that many of them.
Speaker 2:It's actually a small number that are really important, not your other friends, but in terms of your mental health and well-being. In terms of your well-being, it's that inner circle of five people really made a difference, keeping you away from the doctor.
Speaker 1:And am I right in thinking that, with that inner circle of five, if you're in a relationship, that person is one of your five, and I think I heard you say once that that person can sometimes be two of your five if that relationship is at that kind of deep level?
Speaker 2:Yes, I guess this sort of is in the early phase of relationships. Who knows how long it might last, and it may well vary from one individual to another, but certainly during the kind of early romantic phase of the relationship. As we put it, falling in love costs you two friends, so you have to sacrifice two other people because that one special person is taking up twice as much time as everybody else is on a rich, and then you can't really have more than about five people in that circle. Otherwise you're just not giving each of them the time that is really needed to keep that relationship going.
Speaker 1:And do you think today we do dilute ourselves too much by having too many people, and that's not even just our personal connections, it's, I guess, with celebrity culture, like some people are following celebrities so avidly, like maybe they even need to come into one of those circles because they're spending so much time invested in people that they're on their circles but you're not on their circles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the problem is that there's no specification anywhere, as they say that the people in your friendship circles have to be people you necessarily do, in a sense that you can sit down on the same city as them. There's absolutely no reason why you can't have your favorite cat or dog or horse as one of those in a five. The problem is that's actually taking up a space that might become much more important in times of crisis. So what, those, that inner core of five we often call them the shoulders to cry on friends. That's what their job is. They have to be so committed to you in terms of friendship that, as you might say, they're prepared to put the baby down and come and pick you up when your world falls apart. That's how much you mean to them, as opposed to sort of more general friends further out who will kind of say well, actually I'm a bit busy now, the baby needs changing, just in the middle of cooking dinner, or, you know, I'll have a chat with you next week and later.
Speaker 2:What you want from these core inner friends is people who will literally, you know, be the cavalry riding over the hill when your, when your world, falls apart, because your world following your policy cannot work. It has to be sorted out now. So the problem is with fictitious individuals. So many of us do have fictitious individuals in that close circle. They might be, you know, dead ancestors. They might be spirits in the spirit world. They might be religious saints or the Virgin Mary or God or somebody like that.
Speaker 2:They might be characters on the television and indeed, as you mentioned, they might be sadists. Now, the problem with those are is that they're really a bit one way relationships, and my test in this case is when you, your world falls apart. You know, can you rush out into the street and throw your arms around the passing celebrity and say my world has fallen apart, will you help me? And the question is, will they or not? Well, I'll bet you anything you like a passing celebrity or any other stranger is much more likely to reach for their phone and phone the ambulance or the police, whereas a member in a circle of shoulders to cry on friends, of course, will pick you up and do whatever's necessary Take you off and sit you down with a cup of tea you'll require.
Speaker 2:So the. It's about these two way relationships and my worry would be if you, if that world, is filled with people who aren't in some sense real, you're not getting the real benefit. You get some benefit because you feel you have a relationship, so you feel your social world is full, but it's not the kind of relationship where you can walk around the corner and knock on the door and say you know, come and have a cup of? Can I come and have a cup of coffee or something like that? But one of the issues is that all our relationships at some level are a bit of a mental avatar. In other words, when we fall in love with somebody or when we find a bosom friend, as it were, what we actually create the relationship with is a kind of mental image that we make up in our mind. Here is this wonderful person that I've just met and in the know.
Speaker 2:This is as true of romantic relationships as it is friendships, and it and it serves an important purpose. Purpose is there for a reason, and that is if we didn't have this kind of rosy sunglasses and you know, this is just the most exciting thing. So happened to me. We're inclined to sit on the fence doing a kind of will, she won't she will, she won't she ever quite get round to popping the question or, you know, broaching the conversation as it were, something off the fence, to rush in and take a risk, even if you get rejected, then in the normal and at the same level, it turns out there's a lot of research to back this up. Now, the more the rosier the sunglasses, at least in the terms of romantic relationships, the longer the relationship will last, and specifically applies to marriages. So you've got to have this kind of rosy sunglasses is quietly going to disappear over time, edges and knocked off the metare in your mind, and you've got to at least at the higher, where you know you will still have some element of rosiness.
Speaker 1:Many, many years down the line, so you really do want that honeymoon period.
Speaker 2:Yes, and interestingly enough, that honeymoon phase is really the cause of us falling prey to romantic scams on the internet.
Speaker 2:You don't get so many friendship scams on the internet because somehow friendship doesn't sell as well as romance, apparently.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine why, and as a result, you know what they scammers trade on is exactly this rosy sunglasses effect, because they know once, if you don't have the edges rubbed off it by some regular ground truth thing, actually sitting down in front of the person and seeing that they actually got bumps all over their head and funny things like that that we all have, they aren't the perfect person that we somehow start to exaggerate these angelic features of this person and it becomes increasingly difficult to pull yourself out.
Speaker 2:So they pull you on and pull you on. Never let you let you meet them, never let you have a photograph of them. They will send you a you know, cut out from a model agency of this Greek God, or Greek goddess, as it were, and lead you on in that way until you are so deeply immersed that you can't see reality for what it is. And there's some extent that also happens in friendships. We can't be fair. Do get exploited by friends, although it's not usually quite as damaging as a romantic scam, but it's the same psychological processes are underpinning all these kinds of relationships that we have.
Speaker 1:Right, I understand that a few years back, the UK appointed its first Minister for loneliness.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Yes, which you know encouraging that it's that it's being seen as such an important issue that such a role needs to exist. Have you seen any changes since that person has come into post that you think actually that's having the impact that we will need?
Speaker 2:And the answer, I think, is going to have to be no, and I don't even know who it is, or even if they still have one, they generally will ought to. On the other hand, what is happening is increasing recognition in the medical profession the primary care medical profession that say your GP is your family doctors, that what's now become known as social prescribing, maybe just as important to stuffing pills down your throat.
Speaker 2:So they're actually doing that and and it's a slow and agonizing climb up a hill in some sense. But but there is growing recognition that this is a problem and that people are trying different ways of solving it and, as in social prescribing, but also trying to create more of a sense of community in, in say, the workplace, which is another one of the big problems that everybody has. I mean, it's as bad in the US, for example, as it is here and I'm sure in Canada and everywhere else, particularly in the context of large anonymous cities. It's okay if you're in a small rural town where everybody knows everybody else, but if you're in a big city it's a bit of a social desert really and it's very hard when you first get there to find out where your congenial community actually is there.
Speaker 2:Because our relationships are underpinned by this effect of homophily. We much prefer people who are similar to us in a general cultural sense, but also in kind of respect to things like personality and so on. You can see why very easily with personality. If you think of it in terms of even just romantic relationships with my friends, you know if you've got two extroverts, well, you know the decision to go clubbing on Saturday night, it's a no brainer, right, it's a form of nirvana. And if you're both introverts, the decision to get in a pizza and watch a film on the television is an equal no brainer and it's another kind of nirvana.
Speaker 2:But if you've got one extrovert and one introvert, either somebody has to be willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the friendship or you end up with arguments. And you know, at the end of the day, the risk whenever you get arguments and relationships, it's an increasing risk of relationship termination in the long run. You're putting strain on the relationship. So it is. You know, this process of finding people who are very similar to ourselves is kind of very, very natural, so we have to go with it. But we also have to be aware of it because it leads to echo chambers very easily.
Speaker 2:Yes especially so in big cities, I think.
Speaker 1:But also touching on that, I think during the pandemic particularly, we were leaning on our significant others way more than we, than we usually would or is healthy. Whereas if my significant other is an introvert but I have two or three friends in my inner hub who are extroverts and can go out with me clubbing if indeed that's what I want to do Then then does that balance itself out.
Speaker 2:That can work and that very specifically works in the context of women, it seems and this is what your best friend forever, your BFF, actually functions as, because according to a very large literature now I've been looking at this particular curious phenomenon what women consistently seem to say I have no authority, I'm relying on you, is that men are completely hopeless for doing or subserving that emotional kind of confident kind of role that's very important for them because that kind of doesn't exist in the male world. The male world is much more in some ways, anonymous. Actually, it's more club like was decided to find described as being more club like it that in the male social world, what you are, which club you belong to, is much more important than who you are as an individual. So as long as you sign up to the rules of my club, you remember, and that's all I need to know, and the club can be very, very casually defined.
Speaker 2:So it might just be can you get a glass of beer from the table to your lips without spilling it? If you can, that's good enough, we can have fun, whereas for the girls, who you are is much, much more important than what you are. So their relationship is much more dyadic one on one, whereas the boys relationships tend to be kind of diffuse, activity based, don't involve a lot of conversation, usually involve a lot of laughter, which is the only point having conversations to trigger laughter, whereas the point of having conversation for the girls is to discuss some enormously complex emotional relational issue or whatever. So the fact that boys don't do that, fulfill that role very safely seems to have led to this process whereby women run two relations at the same time, a romantic relationship and then a platonic or social relationship which provides that emotional sport, and boys only do one or the other, but not both.
Speaker 1:And with that kind of the female in particular, the piece about processing. And of course we can process on our own. I've been seen to a therapist friend recently and they said they use an empty chair scenario. So you're encouraged to you know if you need to process something before you go and have a difficult conversation. You can have that conversation with an empty chair. And I also I did a podcast recently on AI and then off the back of that, I'm like I don't think AI is the answer and I'm wary of it.
Speaker 1:I'm like, but could we? Could we use it to process? Could it be helpful to process? And then I'm like really that's what our close friends are for, surely and it doesn't mean we need to divulge the names of whoever it is if there's a situation that we really need to get an understanding of. But through processing in relationship, not only is the processor, the instigator who's bringing the problem to the table, able to learn and figure out a solution, but surely the other members of the group who's discussing it is also a learning opportunity for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a two way, two way learning process really, because you're learning. I mean you're trying to deal with your particular problem on the table right now and I'm listening to your explanation of what's going on and with putting our heads together and trying to find a solution. But in that process I'm learning how to handle that situation when it hits me further down the line. So it's a useful thing to be able to do so.
Speaker 2:Those sort of psychological or social processes, I'm quite sure what really really seems to be terribly important, particularly in the women's social world, it kind of isn't in the boys social world. I mean, it just goes over the top of their heads so much. So I mean I don't know how many times I've been told and told by professional social psychologists that they've picked the same thing up. You know, a couple goes to a dinner party and they hear the same conversation, they engage in the same conversation and when they get home the wife says to the husband wasn't it terrible? You know all the trouble that Jemima's been having with her aunties, nieces, whatever? And husband looks blankly and says what? But you were there, you heard it. Yes, I don't remember any of that because it's just not relevant to the way boys' friendship world, social world works, and so we have to live with it, because that's how male and female minds are defined, as it were.
Speaker 1:But a topic that's always been very curious to me is time travel, and I don't know why, like I'm not massively into science fiction but anything time travel, I'm there, I'm sold, I'm watching it, I'm listening to it, I'm reading it and I'm thinking with kind of our social lives and if we are thinking about people from the past, if we're imagining scenarios in the future, we are all time traveling the whole while yes, we're kind of doing that all the time, I guess.
Speaker 2:anyway, in terms of storytelling, storytelling is really important for so community social bonding. It's one of those mechanisms we use for bonding diadic friendships, which scales up extremely well to bond communities. So it's one of the pillars on which community bonding is built in terms of who we are as a community and where we came from, why we're here and sometimes why we're better than that lot over the hill in the next valley. But that process involves very complex psychological processes, cognitive processes which require us to be able to detach ourselves from the world. We're actually living in the physical world in front of me as you're telling me this story. I've been able to detach myself from that and kind of live in, create.
Speaker 2:Again, it's back to this avatar in the mind thing. But create, you know, some vision of this capacity to imagine yourself in another place and indeed another time, if the story is about history, let's say, is majorly important in our ability to create not just our friendships but our communities as bonded communities, and however big that is, whether you're talking about just the little local village in the woods community or you're talking about the nations, an enormous nation state, you know it's the same process that's going on. Storytelling is critical to it all, but you have to be able to detach yourself from reality to be able to do that, and that's very cognitively very complex and neurologically very expensive to do, and we think we are the only species that can actually do that.
Speaker 1:And coming back to these circles. Okay, so if we, if we work out who the five people are, who are kind of, who are our people, who we're prepared to spend so about 40 or 50% of our time at energy thinking about in our, you know, in our free time, and then there's something about then one of those five, then you're kind of linking up with their five and then another one of their five you're linking up with their five to then create your 15.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean just to sort of sketch the background to this.
Speaker 2:So, the number of people we can have meaningful relationships with is very limited. So what's known as Dunbar's number, and it's about 150 people give or take some variation around that depending on mostly on personality and so on and your cognitive abilities, because your ability to handle lots of relationships simultaneously and not, you know, it's a bit like a juggler. I always describe, as you know, mental juggling. You know you have to be able to keep these balls in the air without dropping them by saying something completely rash and stupid at the wrong time, big faux pas and, you know, upsetting somebody. You've been able to keep all these, these relationships, sort of in your mind at the same time.
Speaker 2:So it, our social world, realistically extends out about 150, turns out to be about the same size as a traditional small hunter gatherers camp. Sorry, not a camp, actually it's the community, the clan. So that might involve several camps and in those kind of small scale hunter gatherers societies everybody be related to everybody else in that community. Isn't that different? Actually, even now, in sort of remota, small, remote communities, I don't know, sort of in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland or the snow don't near in Wales, or, you know, the Yukon, somewhere like that. You know we've got very, very small communities. You know everybody knows everybody else. They're all into marrying. You know everybody is somebody's auntie's, cousin, son and so on.
Speaker 2:What you know obviously has happened is, as we live in big cities, since the sort of Neolithic you know, you ended up with large numbers of strangers living together and very often your 150 years scattered across the landscape in different settlements, which is where a lot of the problems arise that we have, I think. But you take your 150 years, your starting point, what you've got is a series of layers coming in towards you. If you sort of think of yourself as a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples on the pond go out represent rather nicely the, the, the layers of relationships, that they're very specific sizes. So the ripple, if you like, is small near to you but much larger further out. That contains more individuals, but the height of the wave is decreases at the time, so the emotional closeness of the relationship declines and these layers are about five, 1550, and then 150, and then they carry on after that for a few more layers.
Speaker 2:But the, the, those numbers are very specific, very consistent. You see them all the time and the inner layers of really don't vary all that much. The outer layers vary a little bit because extroverts tend to have somewhat larger social networks than introverts. Introverts probably have some of the 100 150 people in their total social network, whereas an extravert will have maybe 150 to 250 people. That's because the extroverts prefer to maximize the number of people they have relationships with in order to get the benefits of those information flow and and a wider network of people they can call on. But they do it at the expense of weaker relationships, because we all have the same.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's going to be exactly quantity of quality. And you might see introverts as being risk averse. You know they. They want to make sure that the the regulators they have actually will work when they need them to. So they have fewer, so they can invest more heavily in each one and make sure they they work, and that reflected in in the emphasis we give to the different layers.
Speaker 2:So, as you mentioned, 40% of our total social effort, however you measure it, whether it's emotional closeness or frequency of contact or whatever 40% of our social capital is devoted to just the five people in that innermost circle, the shoulders to crown. So then the 10 people that make up the next layer to give us the 15 circle, get another 20%. So 15 people get 60% of our total social effort because they're the ones that are really going to count, so that different layers are doing different things. The inner, the innermost layers, are, as I said, the kind of shoulders to crown type friends, friends and family, because, remember, this includes extended family as well as friends as we would think of them. You know, the outer most layers are much more valuable for just transmission of information about within an extended community. You know where the best supermarket deals are this week, or you know who the new up and coming comedian is to go and see you have you seen this film yet? You know it's really wonderful.
Speaker 1:How important do you think, robin, it is for us to be conscious of this and to reflect on this and to actually intentionally know who these people are in our lives?
Speaker 2:I've always had a kind of rubric, if you like, about the psychology of relationships in general, which has don't think hard about them, because if you spend time thinking too much about them, you almost certainly screw up. Right, because a lot of these things are highly automated. Yes, we devote a lot of time to thinking about it. Relationships why did Jimmy do whatever he did? How should I go about trying to get this Jemima to agree to do this? And we practice in front of our chair, empty chair. We do do that a lot, but I think if you overdo it, in the end you try and interact as though you've got a script and then everything starts to fall apart. So I used to do a demonstration of this many years ago in lectures when I was lecturing on these kind of topics.
Speaker 2:There's some very nice, very old work on greeting patterns.
Speaker 2:What people do is they approach each other, not strangers, but two people who know each other, meeting in the street, for example, and there's a very set sequence of things you do with your face and eyes that everybody goes through, and I hesitate to tell you what they are because I'm sure to get them wrong, which is merely illustrates the point, but they involve an eyebrow flash, meeting the eyes.
Speaker 2:I think the order is meeting the eyes of the other person, an eyebrow flash of recognition, a look away and a look back and eye contact again. Now I guarantee you do that automatically Every time you meet somebody. You know just automatically. It's perfectly timed. You're doing it in synchrony to the two of you. If you know what you're supposed to be doing and try and think your way through the sequence, you get it wrong every time. So you're much better off just relaxing and going with the flow. Now, this doesn't mean to say that sometimes we don't have to think about relationships and try and work out. That's why they're not working. But if the relationship is working tolerably well, it's better just to let it flow naturally.
Speaker 1:But I would argue that they're not, because otherwise we wouldn't have this loneliness epidemic. So I want to find a way that we can get to the other side of it. So initially, for my initial research, I'm particularly working with spiritual seekers, with expats and with entrepreneurs, and all of these audiences are going through big changes and it's like the people in their inner circles are maybe not on the journey that they're on right now. And that's not to say that those people won't come back into their life in a big way down the line. But I'm aware of how this evolves and how the people in those inner circles can really assist the specific life journey that you're on right now. So in that respect, should we have more intention about who is in those circles?
Speaker 2:Well, there are two separate things probably, I would say here. One is do you have enough people in your circle Right now? I always very hesitate saying you know, the average is five for everybody. That's true, but of course there's some variation in that right. Girls tend to be one or two people extra, boys one or two people less. The big difference is not enormous. So boys will perhaps have four, four to five people in that circle, the girls will have five to six. It's very consistent difference, very consistent. It's always.
Speaker 2:Girls have more and we put that down to the fact they met. They're much better at managing social relationships. The social skills are much better than the boys. And again, you know, introverts will tend to have fewer and extroverts will tend to have a few, a few more. Again, the same kind of reason. But you know, so you have to be a little bit careful about saying oh, you've only got four. If you're happy with four, and that makes your world sing, don't worry about it. But we do have a kind of built in mechanism which tells us, you know, an alarm that goes off when we're in kind of serious trouble. Here it's called loneliness. The brain kicks in, says get out there Talk to somebody.
Speaker 2:Yes, Now the problem is it's kind of not easy to engineer creating friendships out of the blue, I think, because it takes a long time to build them up. We'll just depends what you're trying to achieve, but there's there's one study showed that it takes about 250 hours of face to face contact to turn a complete stranger into a member of your 15 layer, probably a good friend, someone you'd see regularly.
Speaker 1:And would that be impacted if you're inheriting friends through a close friend, through their circles? I wonder if that would change it, because you've already got the you know they've been sense checked through being a good friend of someone that you already trust.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's say somebody who would be a regular social friend of yours, that you go out regularly with. You know, if Susan can't make it, well, you know, jemima, can you know they're your sort of core social friends.
Speaker 1:And a person that's that I've become good friends with recently. They're already part of my wider social circles, so they're a friend of a friend who I've known for a year but haven't been good friends with until recently. So I've kind of already got that social proof, yeah that can will be much quicker.
Speaker 2:You have to invest less because you've already got a starting point, as it were, but then you have to make the effort and then the real problem at the end of the day. So this is all about getting off the fence and bringing somebody up, or engineering a meeting or something like that, or looking for an opportunity. At the end of the day, creating friends is a two way, necessarily a two way process, because in effect, what you're asking the other person to do is to sacrifice one of their friends. Either you're looking for the needle in the haystack, somebody who is identical to you, their shorter friends you know near Vana, when you meet up, or you're having to kind of invade somebody else's existing network and, I guess, persuade them that you're a better friend than any of the other friends they have. Now, that happens all the time, we do that all the time, but it does require some effort and it, you know it's, it's doesn't necessarily always work and it requires effort.
Speaker 2:Now we've just shown with telephone data, telephone call data from the US, from Britain and from Italy, so three different, you might say three different cultures, social cultures anyway that when you meet a new person for the first time.
Speaker 2:So we're seeing that in the phone call records suddenly this new number pops up.
Speaker 2:What happens is you phone them often or in normal life you engineer lots of meetings with them In order to establish who they are and this is establishing how similar they are to you on these kind of cultural dimensions, what we call the seven pillars of friendship, which is kind of like a supermarket barcode of who you are, and the community, the social community you belong to, the cultural community you belong to, and we're looking to match on those.
Speaker 2:And we do it with family and we do it with friends. So you know even families that share more things of these seven dimensions in common with you you have a stronger relationship with than family members, even who might be genetically closer, but you share less in common with, and the same with, friends. So it seems that we invest a lot of time in trying to sort of psych out who this person is and get to know them, and then we decide where they should line our network and we anchor back on the frequency of contact so that the frequency of contact is about right for the layer we want to put them in. Now that seems to take a month. What we found in these data and we do it on all these three data sets is we can predict from the frequency of calling in the first month after meeting which layer they'll end up in and how long the friendship will last.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, that's so intriguing.
Speaker 2:So, but it's a reflection of the fact that you have to make the effort. So you go out there and you kind of, you know, engineer meetings or you ring them up and hope they're not too busy not to want to talk to in order to set it up. But it is in the end all in a matter of luck, in the sense I always come back to that great observer of human foibles and human life, jane Austen. You know. Just see it in all her books. You know that everybody wants to marry Mr Darcy, for very obvious reasons, because he's very, very rich and also extremely good looking. But only one person can you know.
Speaker 2:So you hang on in there, you sort of you know, thrust yourself in front of him at the ball and drop your fan as you go past and all these kind of things in order to get in, you know, involved in conversation with this person. But at the end of the day they're making a choice too, and you know they can't manage more than 70 relationships. So you know they make their decisions you made. In the end you're left out, and so you make a sort of compromise and you go off and marry the curate instead. You know the cure, it being much less desirable and extremely poor, but it's better than nothing.
Speaker 2:So a lot of our friendships are actually friendships of convenience. I think the ones that are very, very strong tend to be established extremely early late teens, early twenties, college age though and it tends to be only one or two right that really hang together and will keep going and you can pick up where you left off, and all these kind of things. But most mostly we're jumping from one friendship of convenience to another, in a context where it's better to have some sort of friend than to have no friend at all. There's two things I just want to touch on now. Firstly, the telephone research.
Speaker 1:I wonder if we can find a source for that to include that, because that's incredibly intriguing. Yep, I can send you a PDF, Thank you, and the other one.
Speaker 2:you touched on the seven pillars of friendship and I wonder if you could talk us through those pillars.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it turns out that our friendships are very, very heavily influenced by similarity.
Speaker 2:The effect is known as the homophily effect, right so? And it was first identified by satiologists who pointed out that people's friends tended to be very similar to them. But they were not Identified by satiologists who pointed out that people's friends tended to be very similar to them in terms of things like religion, political views, personality, these kind of things, ethnicity, and this is indeed true. There are, I guess, two separate groups of things about us that we look for similarity in our friends, right? One of which is what I would call endogenous meaning it's part of us and we can't do much about. I mean, we're born with it in effect, right so, these are things like our gender, ethnicity and I use the term very specifically, not meaning race particularly, but meaning, you know, do they come from the same village as you? Right? Are they west coasters or east coasters? Age, age has a very strong effect. Our friends tend to be the same age as us and personality we tend, as I mentioned before, we tend to prefer people who have some sort of similar personality to us. On the whole, gender is a very, very strong effect. 75% of women's social networks consist of women and 75% of men's social networks consist of men, and that number remains absolutely constant from the age of five to the age of 85. It does not even budge and eyelid. And the 25% of the opposite sex in both cases tend to be family and I'm afraid you have no choice. But given the choice, we prefer friends to be of the same sex and I think that's because social styles are just sufficiently different, even the way the dynamics of conversation are just sufficiently different, that it just is easier, less hassle, less hard work to maintain a relationship, with a friendship with somebody of the same sex than somebody of the opposite sex. So that's the endogenous things. You can't do much about those, you're stuck with them. The other half are kind of what I call exogenous, that's say they come from outside and they're all cultural and they define the cultural community we belong to. What's interesting is they kind of overpower the endogenous effects, particularly things like ethnicity and so on. Those will fade into the background, not so much the gender effect but certainly ethnicity and personality. So it will fade into the background if you match very strongly on these cultural dimensions.
Speaker 2:The cultural dimensions make up what we call the seven pillars of friendship, which are sort of like a supermarket barcode, but it's not stamped on your forehead, you speak it and they are having the same dialect. And this is dialect down to the difference between villages. So you can place a native English speaker. According to the social linguists way back in the 70s, when they first discovered it, you can place a native English speaker to within 20 miles of where they were born the moment they opened their mouth. If you know the various dialects of English.
Speaker 2:English is a hugely diverse language, scattered in many forms across the world, coming from the same place, so you think it really is growing up in the same place. So you didn't have to be there at the same time. But ah, you know so, and so is bar. We used to hang out when we were kids there too. It's that kind of thing, having the same career trajectory.
Speaker 2:So we always used to think very unkindly that the reason lawyers only had lawyers as friends is because nobody else would talk to them. But it turns out, of course, that this is not the thing, because the same is true of medics, the same is true of teachers, the same is true of journalists, etc. Etc. In other words, you're choosing to be friends with people with whom you have some common interests. You can discuss particularly interesting legal cases, or you can discuss particularly complex medical cases. Right gives you something to talk about, that you know how the other person thinks and feels and all these kind of things.
Speaker 2:Having the same hobbies and interests, it's kind of obvious, I suppose. Having the same worldview, which is a kind of mixture of your moral views, your political views and your religious views, you look at the world in the same way, you expect the world to behave in the same way. And then the last two are the kind of really interesting ones. They are having the same sense of humour and having the same musical taste. And we've done fun experiments with both of those, by kind of playing back or offering people possible fictional people that they might want to be friends with, for example, which is actually based on their own humour profile but sort of tweaked and altered so that it's either very similar or slightly similar or not similar at all. And people are very attracted to people who have the same humour profile as they are.
Speaker 2:Music is a really important one. It overwhelms things like ethnicity. If you have the same musical taste, it wipes ethnicity out completely. So I always say there you are At the end. The bar of the last bar is still open in BC four o'clock in the morning, and it turns out that you're both the fans of Joanie Mitchell. This is near Vana. You're fixed for the rest of the day. It might be not be enough to keep the friendship going, because it's only one of the seven pillars, so the friendship won't last forever.
Speaker 1:But it'll tide you over.
Speaker 2:You can have fun.
Speaker 1:It's a really interesting idea about the sense of humour because I've lived kind of a lot of different places around the world and there does seem to be particular nations that have quite a British sense of humour. In particular, I've got a friend whose family is Iranian and the father and his brothers they're a hoot and it just seems like they've got a really British sense of humour. And I've met over here a big group of Iranians and they're very similar. They've got kind of this real fun about them that you can play very quickly with them.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's true that different cultures have very different senses of humour and within your sense of humour is very much coloured by whom you've been associating with, who you grew up with initially, and then, as you go through life and meet different people, it's coloured by the coming together of your interests and their interests. But there are clear differences in national sense of humour around the world. British humour is very complex, is part of the problem, and that goes back to the fact that I think that English always has at least half a dozen words for the same thing, which means you can get very subtle nuances. Now there's ought to apply to all English speakers, but apparently it doesn't in America. It does in Canada, of course, but it doesn't in America, and I'm not sure why that is, but it's true. But I think there is a sense in which a number of other cultures and the Iranians may well be one have that same sense of word play and kind of subtlety of humour as it really is in many ways.
Speaker 1:It is not true everywhere I would love to delve back into the circles. Okay, so I know that they do go beyond 150, but I wanna just think about decluttering. So for a lot of people we have way more than 150 people If you look at kind of the different social networks that we're on and the different communities that we're part of. And I know you kind of said before about it's natural, but do you think there's some value in going? Okay, it's time to declutter and understand that whilst you worked with someone 20 years ago, that you have absolutely nothing in common with them today and actually you don't need to know what they're up to with their family on holiday.
Speaker 2:Yes, in short, but I think we kind of declutter, naturally anyway. I mean, there is a sense in which we try to hang on to old friendships, but I think necessity obliges us to give them up, because this is a simple consequence of the fact that if you're not seeing somebody, so each of the layers of these circles of the social network that we have corresponds to very specific frequency of which we have to see these people. And if you drop below that frequency, the quality of the relationship dies slowly but inevitably. It takes a few years.
Speaker 2:But it is the case that if somebody who say probably not your best friend forever, but somebody in that kind of core social 15 group, if you suddenly can't see them for some reason because they've moved to the other side of the world or they're in prison or whatever, that relationship will inevitably decline and after about three years they will drift out of your 150 into the next layer, out, which is the kind of layer of acquaintances which includes all sorts of people like your regular barista that you get, if you're still allowed to do these things. You're, you know latte from on the way to work every morning and you know as you come in the door he or she has got your latte ready for you, because they know what you want. Have a quick chat with them, you know. You might even know what the names of their kids are.
Speaker 1:But you're kind of, and this topic, robin, I've been talking about recently because if you see anything about your daily coffee and the newspapers, all you tend to read about is the waste, the money and all of this, and no one's talking about the social connection that you're regularly having. So thank you for bringing that up. Is that it? This is serendipitous you don't know who you're going to meet in the queue. You don't know what conversation you're going to have with a barista.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and in the end, of course, any of these social environments are potentially a place where you might meet a new best friend, right? So the big question always is going back to your earlier question about what happens if you're short of friends and you know you realize you need to do something about it. The big problem everybody has is where do you find like-minded people that would, you know, make a? You know you'd rather have a like-minded person or anybody will do as a stopgap, but you'd really rather like to have-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's go for the top one for this exercise, and there's something about-.
Speaker 2:Where do you find these people? And this is the problem that we've had with the 20-somethings generation moving to their first big job after college. You know, up to then life has been orchestrated for you. School provides you with a network. You go to university, all the residents, fraternities, whatever provide you with a ready-made community and then suddenly you're thrown into a job on the other side of the country in a big city. You've never been there, you don't know anybody, you don't even know where to go to meet people. The only people you know are people at work and they already have busy social lives. You know say you can't necessarily guarantee that they're prepared to sacrifice their friends for you. So the question is where do you go? And my answer on all these things, after some reflection, has been you've got to find some kind of social type club. Singing is the best.
Speaker 1:Join a choir I don't mean fancy, you know professional the rock choirs are all the rage, aren't they, rock choirs?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know it's a sort of the equivalent here in the UK would be a garroth Malone, you know sort of you need a casual choir of amateurs with somebody like Gareth Malone who kind of holds it together and keeps it going. So his military wives choir and things like that Singing. It's a good old-fashioned singing around the campfire of songs. Everybody knows whether it's old folk songs or it's folk songs from the 60s, depending on your age obviously. Or you know more modern pop songs. It doesn't really matter, because that process of singing ramps up this sense of belonging and you know it gives you the context, gives you an opportunity and opening into meeting other people. It turns out that voluntary volunteering is almost as good.
Speaker 2:We did a very big study some years back from my collaborators in Denmark looking at symptoms of depression and you minimise symptoms of depression. So this was two years later, so it was a prospective study. If you had five friends or three volunteering activities, you could kind of mix and match them, but you couldn't add them together right. So you can have three friends and one or two, let's say, volunteering activities, that was okay. Or you could have no friends and three volunteering activities or no volunteering and five friends. But you couldn't sort of add five friends and three voluntary activities together because you're spreading your load too thinly, right. And the point about the volunteering and you know you minimised your risk of depression by having three volunteering activities. So this was you know things like helping with the scouts, helping with the political party, probably helping in a charity shop, doing the flowers at church. If you do those kind of things, those you know kind of things, they're very social activities. You're meeting people and people with, at least in principle, some sort of common interest. Otherwise they wouldn't be volunteering in that particular context, right? So the point is that's giving you a place in which you can meet like-minded people as a sort of platform to build from, because you know they know other people and they may know people who are lonely too. So they think, aha, this is village matchmaker stuff, but on the friendship scale, not the marriage scale, as it were. So it's finding the right kind of environments and any of those kind of contexts where people whereas many people present and enjoying themselves, is what you need to look for.
Speaker 2:And it's hard, okay, sometimes it's hard to know if you moved to a new location, as you did two years ago. It's hard to know where these are. It takes a while to find out, but I think the whole problem, you know this is a much bigger problem now. People have always moved right, otherwise Canada and the US wouldn't be full of Europeans in the way they are. People have always moved, but by and large in the past they've either moved as groups, you know, or they've moved, as you know, in relatively small numbers into small communities. The problem now, I think, is everything is so much more mobile. For jobs in particular, people are moving many times to completely new places, not necessarily within the same country, during their working life, and every time you do that, it's fine if you've got a, if you move as a family, because you've got a little kind of base to work from. But if you're moving as a single person, you know you're being thrown into, you know a sea full of sharks and you have no idea where the safe islands are.
Speaker 1:And then Robin, if you go and you try and keep your four in your circle, then there's no spaciousness to be inviting others in. Do you need to take a sabbatical on friendships if you move abroad to allow that?
Speaker 2:I think you do. You have to be prepared to sacrifice, and the problem is you will never properly sacrifice your family relationships, and they occupy about 50% In small-scale societies. They are your entire 150 in very small-scale societies. But even in the modern world with our small family sizes, our extended families, still counts for about 50% of your total 150 when you top them up and we give priority to them and they kind of self-regulate, because there are lots of interconnections that keep everybody in the loop and, you know, sort of maintain their interest in you or your interest in them. It's the friendship circles that disappear very quickly and as a result of which, you know, as we move through life we end up with these little pockets of two or three people from previous existences. We sort of collect them as we move from one city, one job to another, and we hang on to the ones that really matter. But those relationships tend to die away very quickly and so they do free up, and I think it is important in the end to be prepared to sacrifice some of those in order to maintain working relationships with a small group of friends that are going to matter.
Speaker 2:And the issue here is that if you're life falls apart. What you need is somebody who's going to, as I said before, drop the baby and come and give you a hug and pick you up right, put you back on your feet. The only way they can do that is if they live around the corner, right? It doesn't work on the telephone, it doesn't work on Zoom, it's a physical thing, and I think one of the problems people have had and I've had a number of people comment on this as a phenomenon is that people it's especially true of the girls this is kind of not how boys sort of work, because boys' world is so casual, it's out of sight, out of mind, right, it was very nice knowing Jimmy, but now Jimmy's gone to Thailand.
Speaker 2:Pete just gets stuffed in his slot, right, because he's, you know, got the right credentials and that's all that matters, whereas girls, because their relationships are more intimate and more dietic with their friends, in a sense, will spend a lot of time texting and emailing and posting Facebook and all the social media and so on, phoning to try and keep those friendships going. And the answer is yes, that's not unimportant, it's a value judgment. Are they really so important that it's actually better to have? Keep them, even though they're not down, you know, living in the next block on the street. Or would you be better off with finding somebody new to replace them who is a bit more accessible? There's no perfect solution to that. That's a judgment you have to make. But the one I do worry about people who get trapped into you know sort of trying to keep those distance relationships going when actually it just might not be in their best interest to do so.
Speaker 1:Right and I do hear this from from expats around the world that they're like they actually don't have space for people where they are because they're so consumed with keeping in touch with people back home. So it's finding that balance.
Speaker 2:And you know social media has created that problem because you know it's been 20 years ago probably. Certainly you know, if you go about 50 years or so, if you moved in that kind of expati way, you know the best you could do was writing letters. You know, and okay, that kind of kept relation, I mean all immigrants. The history of immigration into North America, you know, reflects that very nicely. You know they kept contact with siblings or maybe their cousins or their aunties or something, or parents back home in Europe. But the next generation had no sense of who these people are, the strangers, because they never let them Right.
Speaker 2:So so it's kind of, you know there is this natural want to to maintain those kind of relationships but they would have died naturally with time just because of the distance and of course social media has allowed you to create this fiction. It's all about avatars in the head again, that you can keep, maintain these relationships even though you're not physically there. Well, you know you could argue that if you're a kind of peripatetic expat in the business world or you know embassy staff or something like that, eventually you're going to go back home, you're not all going to emigrate to Timbuktu or wherever, and therefore keeping those relationships ticking over to come back to in the future may be important, but on the other hand, you know, if you're decided you're going to emigrate to Canada and not go back to Wales or wherever you want to consider you came from, actually, well, it's kind of you don't want to get rid of those relationships and offload.
Speaker 1:No, because it would always be a hub for us anyway.
Speaker 2:Canceling them, but you do need to think about building new ones.
Speaker 1:And you touched on social networks there and like personally for me, so I've got LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Is that too many? Do we need to focus on? Less Is less more.
Speaker 2:I think the problem is you spend so much time on it that actually you take time. You risk taking time away from real relationships. That's particularly clear, I think, with things like LinkedIn or Twitter. Twitter is the archetype, for example, because Twitter operates most social media, thinking of Facebook kind of thing or a WhatsApp group. You're exchanging backwards and forwards. It's a bit clunky and slow is the problem, and so it never comes across quite as electric as a face-to-face interaction. The jokes fall flat because the delay is too long.
Speaker 2:But things like Twitter and maybe Instagram, where you're just posting stuff, are a bit like lighthouses flashing away into the dark and if a ship goes past or if a ship doesn't go past really is irrelevant, and then nothing happens, doesn't matter. So it's not building a meaningful two way relationship. It is a kind of one way relationship. You know where. You know we compare and go oh, look where Shelley's been this week, what a mess she made of that one. But we're not engaging with you directly in those contexts and therefore we're not building a relationship so readily with you. So you know, and therefore that's time taken up, all this thinking time about you know, which photograph should I put on Instagram or what should I say on LinkedIn or Twitter? Is time that's being taken away from real relationships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my yoga teacher, Kristin Rose. She calls it tiger time, so before she goes online she plans exactly what she needs to do. She gets in like a tiger, gets it done and shuts it down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because this is the problem is. It's so beguiling, there's a temptation to start scrolling and you know, anything on the internet is a bit like that I was. I avoid all social media. I am on LinkedIn because my son's told me I should be, but occasionally my publishers tell me to put things up there. Yes, I tend to avoid these things completely because I just don't have the patience or the time really is much they need to to engage in it. But I'm very conscious that I can get on the internet and you, you know these little things that come up on the sidebar, which is, you know, oh, you might be interested in that, and you go, oh yeah, that looks interesting, and you're chasing one page to another, page to another time and time.
Speaker 2:And what have you?
Speaker 1:achieved at the end.
Speaker 1:And I'd love to touch on. We spoke about letters before and, going back in time, this was the default. So when I was when I was 11, my father emigrated to New Zealand. So back then letters were our default and it wasn't too long before emails were accessible to us only a few years. So for me in my journey through life, communications has always been incredibly important. It's probably no surprise that I went into PR and communications, because I've been doing it from a very early age and I've still got all my emails from those times and going from letter writing to email writing. The emails we would write would be pages, because you're used to writing that long form, yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't write those long emails anymore, which is a shame. And actually, if I really thought about the people in my inner circles, particularly those ones that aren't here in Canada, that are in the US or in other places in the world, rather than spending an hour on LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter like sitting down and writing a couple of either letters or emails, how would that enrich my life and enrich the life of the recipient, in contrast to the kind of growing out to the ether message that the majority of us do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the answer is the less often the better. So I'm very conscious of the fact that emails generate a trail of emails which become less and less important and more and more casual. So you've got this temptation to reply immediately, and I think there's a tendency for people not to read the whole of a long email anymore. They'll read the first two lines and then their eyes will glaze over or they'll just move on Because there's a shed load of other emails to get through, Whereas I'm very conscious, having also I grew up in East Africa in the 50s 60s. My father grew up in India in the 20s, early 30s, long before you had any of these things, and we didn't have international phone calls until well into the 60s, I'd say mid 60s. In East Africa People do from the houses and businesses did, but it was not a common thing to do.
Speaker 1:You could have like one on the street to share.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, and so it was all about letter writing, and I think you don't do letter writing very often, so we're back to Victorian letter writing. It takes six months for the letter to get there, the other side of the world, so you've got plenty of time to compose. You've got a long letter, and then, of course, you've got a long delay before you get a reply. So when you do get a reply, you want to read everything in it.
Speaker 1:You're really excited about it.
Speaker 2:Yes, Exactly so. I think kind of digital media have been their own worst enemies. Really. They've destroyed the process of communication by making it too easy.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And too easy, because even in the face to face world you have to make an effort, right? So you decide well, we're going to go out all evening, right, I'm going to meet you at 6.30. And we're not going home till 10.30. So, but we don't do that every day, Right? It's kind of like once a week or once a month or something like that, and we make that conscious decision that now we're going to sit down, have a good chin wag here. But it's because it would pale into other boredom if you tried to do that every week. It's a bit like living with somebody dare I say this living with somebody day in, day out.
Speaker 1:And then you go on holiday with the same person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So we've just done, we've just mixed things up. This summer, my partner and I decided to. We've got very young children, so I took them to the UK. My mum got married, so I got to spend three weeks with my friends and family in the UK, and then my partner and I switched and he got to spend a couple of weeks with his friends and family. So we had five weeks away from each other this summer, which we've never done, and quite a few weeks without our children, which was a game changer, really, and this really allowed me like I've been doing this research for a couple of years, but allowed me to start putting myself out there solo again and remembering who that version of me is when it's just me.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's not you. As an addendum to a 12 year old.
Speaker 1:Right. How important do you think that is to put ourselves out there on our own every so often?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. It's not actually something we've ever looked at. It's not really I'm not sure that anything we've done kind of tells us anything particularly about that. So anything I say is just based on an instinct as much as anything. I'm sure it's good for recharging the batteries and there is a sense. I mean, humans are interesting because we are intensely social at one level, but on another level we're not. We do like a bit of quite a time.
Speaker 1:Yes, particularly men.
Speaker 2:And particularly men. Yes, because they are much, much less social. If you look at groups of ramblers, you know the women. They break up straight away into two groups the women and the men. Right Back to this tendency for homophily to kick in. It does in all conversations. If you have more than four people in a conversation, that group will break up into two conversational groups, one of men predominant, the other women predominant, and the women, because conversation is crucial to how they build and manage their relationships. That's central to what maintains the quality of their relationships. So they will engage with each other, whereas men don't. Their conversation is primarily function. Primary function of conversation for men is to tell jokes, that's all, to make you laugh, and anything beyond that isn't terribly interesting. So they don't remember much of the conversation, right? So you know I meet up with some guys once a month or thereabouts for a pie and a pie to lunch, and my wife always asks me what you talk about. I go. I have no idea, but you were there for several hours, yeah, whereas women will know what the whole conversation is from beginning to end. So, and I have this there's.
Speaker 2:There was a lovely photograph that was in a lot of magazines. Because such a beautiful photograph way back it must have been about the 80s of two old Greek men sitting in the sunshine outside at Taverna, right In the side by side, either side of a table and you know, jollywell was going on. Every so often they pick up the glass of Uso or their coffee and take a sip, put it down, complete silence, not saying a word to each other. This is boys bonding, because the way boys bond their relationships is activity based. It's doing stuff, banging heads together, whether that's on the rugby field or the ice hockey field or climbing mountains or canoeing, kayaking on the lake or what. It's activity, very activity based in some form, and often doesn't involve much conversation.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So these are important to kind of aspects of this, the way our social worlds are built, that are important. And you know, having time out on top of that then often becomes important for allowing you to reset button. And I remember my supervisor PhD supervisor who worked on Tibetans in Ladakh, little Tibet, which is the Indian side of the Sanskrit Valley in Kashmir, which is sort of extension of Tibet that got left behind in India basically, and he was saying the what happens there? Because they, they have polyandrous marriages, so the wife marries a complete set of brothers who range in age from three, the youngest to, you know, perhaps early 20s, the oldest when they get married, married 20s, 20s, 20s, and handling these five husbands in the end gets to them sooner or later. And he says it's all kind of accepted, culturally accepted.
Speaker 2:Every so often the wife is permitted to go mad and you just leave her alone. It's just resetting a button. So this is really taking time out. So you know they'll do kind of crazy things which which you wouldn't do in normal life, like run along very high walls which are, you know, sort of one brick wide and 50 feet off the ground, and things like that, and you just have they're just getting out of the house, basically, and getting into their own headspace just to kind of, you know, reboot. So I think that those kind of things you could do it. That's how they do it. I wouldn't recommend it. There are maybe safer ways of doing it. But you know, one can see the logic here that, yes, we're social creatures, but living in intense intimacy is very, very stressful in the end. Right, and just a little bit of a break.
Speaker 1:And I tried this last year my fam I moved with my family into an intentional community for four months. So I tried this and I thought that this was going to be the way for me and I still like a lot of elements of that way of living and I don't know how that will evolve in my mind going into the future, but it did feel very intense and I was quite relieved. Once we moved back to modern society I was quite relieved.
Speaker 2:To shut yourself in your bedroom.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, we did have our own separate home, two bedroom home, but even so, there was a lot of time in community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is why monastic orders end up becoming silent. You're not allowed to talk to anybody else except, you know, for a half an hour over lunch or something. It's the only way to maintain. I'm sure it's the only way to maintain. They've learned by experience and practice. This is the only way to keep the place sane. Keep the place together.
Speaker 1:Something that came up when I ran a workshop recently on relationships and how relationships evolve, and one of the things that came to me then was are we looking for people that we can simply be with? So, yes, there's people you can do things with, but the kind of people that you would be happy just not saying anything, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think this goes back to the seven pillars. So these are the people who you know instantly when you first meet them. They're a complete you know doppelganger to you and it's obvious that they are your best friend forever. And they always share seven almost all the seven pillars with you in some way or other. And the problem is, the fewer the seven pillars you share with somebody, the more likely you are to get friction Because you're going to disagree about something If you don't share a seven pillar. You know.
Speaker 1:So how many of the seven needs to be tick, tick, tick?
Speaker 2:As a kind of rough guide. I always suggest that you need six or seven of the seven pillars to be in the inner circle of fire. You need at least one to be in the hundred and fifty so you can kind of scatter them, the seven pillars between, across the layers in between. But you really need six or seven to be the same to have a very close kind of intimate social relationship. I don't mean intimate romantic relationship, I mean close platonic relationship to keep it going over a long period of time.
Speaker 1:And one of the things I one of the things I heard you say in another interview that when you were doing part of this research you would get people to write down the hundred and fifty, and you said in one interview that one woman got incredibly pissed off with you for making her do it.
Speaker 1:So, what would be a good way to start Like, do you think looking at having 15 people in your mind and starting to think about that before you start thinking about which spheres they're in? What would be a good number in your mind to get?
Speaker 2:started. Yeah, I think probably the best place is the five and 15 circles, because beyond that they are so much less important to you. You know they're part of your wider circle for sure, and that's what we call your Christmas card circle. You think about them once a year and the days when people used to send Christmas cards anyway, you know, come early December you would sit down and think, oh, you know, who should I send a Christmas card? Who still mean something to me? So you know, those relationships probably aren't. It's not they're unimportant, but they aren't that important. The ones in the inner circles are the ones that you really want to talk up and see who's there and why they're there. And at least those two inner circles are quite small numbers. So it's a maximum of 15 people five people in the shoulders to ground circle and then another 10 people to make up the 15 circle.
Speaker 1:So that's a manageable number and a different sphere as well, as it supports supporters Sorry, sympathy group.
Speaker 2:That's the sympathy group of 15. Yes, the sympathy group, it was originally defined by some social psychologists back in the 80s, I think 1980s, long down. It was the first circle anybody knew anything about and they just remarked on how often the number 12 seemed to come up in all sorts of contexts. And so you know, the number of jurors of 12 inner cabinets tend to be 12. Most team games are sort of around about 11 or 12 and size, sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger, but you know, not a lot smaller, maybe eight, not a lot bigger, but a lot smaller than 15.
Speaker 2:Yes, and endless examples in everyday life. And then they looked at, they asked a bunch of people to list people who, if they died tomorrow, you'd be genuinely upset about. I mean seriously upset about, rather than just, oh you know, such a shame kind of upset and I'll go along to the funeral. This is, this is you know you would be in tears about, and it came out again about 12. And so they called it the sympathy group.
Speaker 2:All our data suggests that it's really about 15, probably, yes, 12 and 12. But you know, it's the same principle. I'm 1215, who cares?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I've been following a guy named Frederick Lalu for a couple of years. He wrote a book called reinventing organizations and one of the pillars of his work is about self managing teams and he had come to, but it's between 12 and 15. That's the maximum you can have for a self managing team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely right. There is a real crisis point somewhere around about 40 where you organizations or groups work groups. I have to shift from being democratic to having a managing committee 14.
Speaker 1:14. 40.
Speaker 2:40. Okay, yes, it's between the 15 layer and the 50 layer that this happens, and it seems to be a critical structure.
Speaker 1:You need more structure to it.
Speaker 2:You need a management structure, basically, if it's smaller than that. So you know, sort of, in terms of these layers, the five and 15 circles beliefs themselves. Yes, they deal with it internally.
Speaker 1:And then I heard you say a little bit earlier in our conversation something about three years, like if you haven't been in contact for three years and those people are probably going to come off the page altogether. Yes, would it serve us well to bring some regularity in. So say, you are living abroad for three years, maybe putting in an annual call with a group of people that you still want to remain in contact with?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm sure that's true, because that's probably people, particularly people who are bored, as I said earlier you know, who are abroad transiently because of their job. You know embassies, businesses, you know moving from one continent to another constantly, that sooner or later you are going to return quote unquote home. But therefore you want to. You don't want to end up going back home late in life when you're going to find it harder to make friends anyway the end of your career. You don't want to get back to somewhere you don't know anybody anymore. This is the perennial problem for people working in the empire. You know they go out and they did ministry these places and you know when they all came back here, britain was a different place and it didn't fit in. It didn't know anybody anymore except family. So this is a serious problem. You don't want to be left in that situation.
Speaker 2:It is important to keep some of those relationships going. I'm sure, and that's a question of kind of sitting down and totting up the pros and cons for different individuals, because the problem is your seven pillars change with time. This is the big problem, at least with family. You've got certain kinds of circumstances, which is, the other members of the family that you all have an interest in. But with friends it's what you're interested in, not who. You're interested in as much as anything. And those seven pillars, components, the cultural components, change across life as well.
Speaker 2:The big world changes. You know, new stars of humor come in and films come along, all these kind of things that change our cultural life over the course of decades. And so if you haven't seen somebody for 40 years, by the time you meet up and this is a very common experience of people meeting up with school reunions right 40 years later, you have a very, very deep relationship back in the day in order for that relationship to spark again. But most of the people you meet on these days you kind of think for goodness sakes, was I actually friends with them? They're awful, you got no taste in music.
Speaker 1:I've still got quite a solid group of friends from school. We don't catch up all that often but yeah, when we do, we do still have, we're still friends.
Speaker 1:You can feel that we're still friends and I did do some digital catch ups with them. I have done some digital catch ups with them and I think quarterly, quarterly to six monthly seems to be a really nice way. So you're kind of you still, and then after we would do those digital catch ups, then we catch up in person just once a year whilst I'm away, and then you don't need to spend that time kind of going into everything that you've been doing, because you've kind of already had that. So then you can just enjoy being in presence with them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. But I think you hit the nail on the head. There is that you're maintaining those friendships through time or you're making the effort to maintain and converge. So if you've kept that relationship up intermittently over a long period of time, then it still has enough in common to spark it off again. If you want to do so, it's if you haven't seen them for 40 years at all, and all of us have this little cohort of maybe only a couple of people from each stage of life which you've made.
Speaker 2:Those friendships were so close and intense. They kind of ground in stones so they don't kind of obliterate quite so quickly and they're easier to pick up. But it's the other ones out beyond that who you had a lot to do with, because they were there, they were sort of filling the slots and you didn't choose them, they just came with the territory, schools, university, whatever. They're the ones who had much more likely drifted so far apart that you actually no longer have anything in common with them, and they're the ones where you kind of look a scant and think what was I up to?
Speaker 2:Well, at the time it was, it was because you actually had lots of things in common. It's just that you've kind of drifted apart or drifted your own ways as a result of different life experiences. And that's very often the problem, and that's why you should never get back to the town you were born in, because you have a memory of it, of what it was like as a child or a teenager, and you go back now and you find it's been wrecked because it's full of McDonald's burger bars but where to you know, lovely fish and chip bars or Jimmy's pub that everybody went to on Friday night and then Friday night has disappeared.
Speaker 1:Although I know my granddad really encouraged me to go back to my hometown and just speak to the students in the school. So then, inspire them. You know what's possible if you do stretch beyond your hometown, so I will do that one day.
Speaker 2:That's a slightly different thing to going back for a purely social visit, to go back to somewhere where you have these very rosy memories of what life was like, because everywhere changes. If it hasn't changed, there's something seriously rotten, probably you know the place is dying.
Speaker 1:Imagine the Cotswolds, though the Cotswolds would never change.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's true, probably is true, but that's because of lots of rich people buying cottages that keep that culture going in a sense. But still, you know, you go back and it's not the same people. Yes, yes, the accents change, because accents change over time. You know they. You know Liverpoolians don't speak like the Beatles anymore 50 years off. Not that the Beatles were really hardline Liverpoolians, of course, because they were sort of middle-class Liverpoolians, they weren't Scasses. But you know, the accent has noticeably changed in 50 years. In that generation. Right, the older people who were 20 teenagers in the 60s, they sort of still speak the same, but not, you know, it's noticeably different, I think. But certainly the younger generation, the accent has moved on. Each generation changes. It brings in a new dialect because they don't want to sound like these old folk.
Speaker 1:So is the dialects getting softer, do you think?
Speaker 2:Actually harder, I think. Oh really.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's so interesting Something I would really love to touch on. While I have you today and I'm conscious that we're I've got so much that I could say or ask you, so maybe we can jump on again once. I'm even further along with this process, but one of the really big topics is trust.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And I know, yeah, through my research with expats like trust doesn't come too easy. And when there is trust I think I did in my Science of Happiness training researcher Paul J Zach was talking about oxytocin, which even when we're trusted by strangers, oxytocin is released in our brains and that then makes us much more likely to want to see that person again.
Speaker 2:That's yes, up to a point. Trust is certainly the beginning and the end of relationships, because that's what allows us to maintain these avatar relationships. We expect this other person to behave in the way we've constructed our avatar of them, and so when they then behave differently, don't turn up when they said they would, or fail to return the cup of coffee, the jar of coffee that we learned them, or whatever. These eat away at the trust level in the relationship. And we're very forgiving if for close relationships and family relationships. But it sort of depends really on the quality of the relationship. So if it's somebody further out in the friendship circles, there will be a tendency to just see them less. The bar is much lower if they do it twice. Just don't make the effort again, right, and so the relationship just fades. Naturally. If it's close in so particularly romantic relationships, best friend relationships, very close family relationships we're extremely tolerant, forgiving, until finally this extra store is added to the camel's back and at that point everything collapses catastrophically. And those because you've just done it once too often, right, and those relationships are very difficult to reconcile. They're almost always deathbed at reconciliations or not at all Because somebody is so outraged and offended. So they happen fairly regularly, surprisingly often actually. We thought about once in every 10 years close relationship will collapse, like that Was from the data we collected anyway. Yeah, there was a. What was the second part of your question? I've forgotten Oxytocin. Oh, oxytocin, okay. So, yes, oxytocin plays a sort of role, but it seems like the role that oxytocin plays is actually by persuading you to be generous, Right? So if you have the right oxytocin genes, you are more tolerant and loving, I suppose you might say, than somebody who has a different set of oxytocin genes. It's much.
Speaker 2:There's two problems with oxytocin, though, in this context. One is it's very short lived. It has a half life in the order of 30 seconds to a minute, something like that, Because originally it was its function. Well, actually its function is to maintain water balance. It comes from our fish and systems, and for us it's to keep the body fluids still at the right level, from which it got adapted to lactation. So it's very heavily involved in lactation, causes milk to let down. When babies are put on the teeth, as it were, the stimulation of them sucking triggers the oxytocin system, and that triggers milk let down. And then from that it got adapted to romantic relationships through sex. Sex triggers oxytocin release, but it's very short lived and its effects are not at all long term and it seems to be impossible to trigger it in other people. You either have it or you don't. You might trigger it in somebody else, but only if they've got the right genes.
Speaker 2:What seems to be important in creating these bonded relationships and the trust component of it is actually the endorphin system. The endorphin system has a half life measured in minutes rather than seconds. Sorry, in hours rather than seconds. Second has a half life about an hour and a half. It is very easy to trigger the endorphin system in other people and you can do it through physical contact. So it comes from monkeys social grooming, which we still do, but we've adapted it because we don't have much fur anymore. But you do see it. You see really good primate social grooming Occasionally, for example in the context of mothers playing with the hair of their young children.
Speaker 2:It really is just out of the script book. Really it's marvelous to watch. But you also see it in adults in a similar way. But the more general way we've adapted it is in terms of cuddling and stroking and hugging and things like that, Because what it does is a highly specialized neural system in the skin which responds to one stimulus and one stimulus only. And that is light, slow stroking at three centimeters a second, exactly which is actually the speed of hand movements during grooming in monkeys.
Speaker 2:What the deformation of the skin and the hair? You still got the hairs there or the hair roots, even if you're not terribly hairy. Over most of the body, machinery of hairs is still there and these receptors are all over the hairy skin. So as you stroke somebody you're deforming the skin and moving the receptors and they trigger a response. They're very slow. The nerves that connect them to the brain are completely different to the nerves for the rest of the peripheral nerve system. So they're very slow and they go to a different part of the brain. The part of the brain triggers an endorphin system and that seems to create this sense of warmth towards another person. It literally is warmth, because it's been shown that we get the same sensation from that as we get from holding a warm cup of coffee. The same bit of the brain is firing up.
Speaker 2:Now this stuff works fine in the monkey-like way for our close relationships, which is why we do a lot of stroking and hugging and the like with our closer friends and family. But there's a limit. We think probably the limit is about 50 out of 50 people, that sort of area, so by no means the 450. Beyond 50 people it's handshakes only. I'm letting you get a little close, but you can come in any closer than this, mate. But what we've done? Because we've still got the same problem of how to bond these very big groups using this same endorphin mechanism. So that's the glue that creates bonded relationships in primates.
Speaker 2:And there's other ways of triggering the system that don't have the intimacy that makes touch so limiting.
Speaker 2:And these include things like laughter, which we can, and the point is, without the intimacy, it means you can trigger it in several people simultaneously and therefore have a bigger group, bigger bonding group, if you like, grooming group. And they are as they came in successively over a couple of million years. Laughter, which seems to be very ancient, so you share it with the great apes, Singing and dancing, singing without words, the rituals, the religion, feasting, eating and drinking alcohol together Alcohol is a very good trigger of the endorphin system and telling emotional sub stories. All of these, we've shown, trigger the endorphin system and all of them, we've shown, create a sense of bonding with the people you do it with, and it doesn't affect quality of your relationship with people who are not there. So even though your, if your best friend is not there on the day when you have this social meal or do some dancing, it doesn't affect the relationship with them, but it changes the relationship you have with a complete stranger.
Speaker 2:It turns them into a friend.
Speaker 1:Beautiful.
Speaker 2:And there's an interesting thing about endorphins is we think that they are responsible for trance states. Trance states are always associated with stressful imposition on the body, so they're either breathing exercises, which are extremely good at triggering endorphins, so the, the this is why laughter works right, because you're pumping very, very hard on the diaphragm but controlled, controlled breath release, as in singing, is also extremely good. And so breath control, as in Buddhist type meditation exercises, is doing the same thing. It's the, it's triggering the endorphin system, or so that's the. That's the sophisticated way of doing it, if you like.
Speaker 2:The brute force and ignorance way, which is equally good, but just harder work, is to do it as it's often done in in many, particularly the, the, both the south and the North American Indian, and so say on the sort of sessions, as it were, if that's the right word involves a lot of physical stress.
Speaker 2:So if you look at the plains Indians and the way they induce trance states, you know they would go through for a long run through the forest and jump into IC cold called rivers and then go and sit in the smokehouse in the DP, get heated up and smoke a peace pipe, because that, you know, interrupts your breathing and stuff, inhaling all these fumes and stuff, and it's that combination of things or in the kind of a lot of heavy dancing, say dancing in circles, very rhythmic. So it's the Kung San do it with their trance dances and the American planes Indians did it with, in many cases with their dancing around the fire as they go down to the beat of the drum. These things trigger the endorphin system like crazy and if you get the endorphin system up high enough you go over into trance.
Speaker 1:Hmm, beautiful, I just have my. I've started cold dipping just a couple of weeks ago and I first went dangerous stuff in Canada.
Speaker 1:Yes, I know it's very, very cold in the ocean here, but my friend has been doing it for years so she took me in and she took me in in the different levels. So you start, you walk in to below the belly button and let yourself get a little bit of climatized. Then you go into just above the belly button and then you kind of splash yourself before you go fully in and then you're standing upright up to here and if you haven't got gloves on which I didn't you kind of keep your hands, hands and head out. But I was so surprised that after three and a half minutes she was timing it. I was like Clare my legs feel like they're burning.
Speaker 1:Yes, and she's like yeah, that's your inner furnace. Yes, Starting up.
Speaker 2:I had no idea, I had no idea.
Speaker 1:It was amazing. What a sensation. So the people that do this cold water dipping all the time, they go out for longer and longer because they're waiting for that sensation to take over their bodies.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep.
Speaker 1:So this is the endorphin.
Speaker 2:It looked absolutely nauseous.
Speaker 1:Not yet.
Speaker 2:Not yet. Yes, yes, I'm just just reminded of. There was a very famous American anthropologist, but birds, that I can't remember his first name. Anyway, in the 60s he was quite an old man, but in the 70s he was quite an old man, this 70s I think, when I met him and I remember him saying because he was from California, stamford or something like that, in the West Coast, and he's saying, and it's a sort of the tail end of the hippie period. He's saying you know, we're an East Coast family and the rest of my family is still over there and my brothers thank God every day for the Rockies. It's to keep these wackies away from the East Coast.
Speaker 1:I've always gravitated West. When I lived in Australia, I lived in Perth, and when I lived in the UK I moved to Wales and now I've moved to Canada. I'm on the West Coast.
Speaker 2:I spent my earliest years in Calgore in West Australia.
Speaker 1:Oh right.
Speaker 2:The mining town.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:In the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1:Until what age?
Speaker 2:I was about three when we left and we went to East Africa.
Speaker 1:Yes, you were traveling around a lot as a young child, and then did you find a stable base.
Speaker 2:No, because we were always moving in East Africa, I never had a stable base really.
Speaker 1:And do you think that's contributed to the direction of the research that you've gone into?
Speaker 2:No, no, yes, indirectly, but not in the sense you might be thinking. It has, in the sense that I've been immersed in many different cultures. I mean literally immersed. So this is not peering in from the outside, it's just sitting around the smoking fire.
Speaker 1:Lived experience, grounded theory.
Speaker 2:So I mean I'm bilingual in Swahili because I grew up from. We moved there when I was just really learning to speak so I learned English and Swahili. At the same time, and because my father had grown up in India, was born in India, grew up there, didn't leave till he was in his twenties, he spoke Hindi. He spoke Hindi before he spoke English, much to his parents' frustration, especially as his mother was American. But you know. So we had a lot to do with the Indian communities in East Africa. So I was kind of immersed in both these African communities, tribal communities, arab communities, because it was on the coast Swahili, half Arab, half Bantu language, but also exposed to all these different Indian communities. So I knew the difference between Sikhs and Parsi's and Gujaratis and Ishmailes and Bajora, all the different sects of Islam and stuff, and the different ethnic groups in India from Nehidra and Rastava. So you know, it's very easy for me to sink into a social environment in that sense.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I see that. So in your opinion, can loneliness like the trajectory that it's been going on in recent history? Can we turn this around?
Speaker 2:The answer is yes, but my worry is our communities are just too big, which means it won't happen easily, naturally, so we have to go out of our way to make it work.