Dunbar

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. ... This number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. ... he proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. ... Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

To continue from my last post, the reason why I'm thinking about the value of friendships is because I am meeting a lot of new people through the various activities I am doing, and so I feel like I don't have the capacity to continue to maintain friendships, but I don't know of a good culling process. To be honest, my ideal would be to have a few friends that I see regularly (once a month or more), a large group of friends who I see sporadically (once a year or more, but less than once every few months), and to rarely see the rest of my friends (less than once a year).

I've mentioned this before, but I always wanted to have a best friend like in the movies, but I feel like in trying to maintain so many friendships, I am missing out on the chance to find that person and grow that friendship.

Another experiment from the Dan Ariely book. In this experiment, the participants could click on three different doors: red, blue, or green. Each click used up a click, of which they only had a hundred. Each door contributed a different amount of money, which the person got at the end. So in the first case, once the participants worked out which door had the highest payout, they just clicked that door until they ran out of clicks.

He changed the experiment so that if you clicked on a door, the other two doors would shrink each time you clicked it, and eventually disappear. But you could click on a shrunken door to grow it again (though at the expense of the other two doors shrinking a little). You would think that it wouldn't matter, same as last time, once they found out which door paid the most, they would keep clicking it. But that's not what happened in the experiment. He found that most of the participants would start clicking the shrinking doors to try and "save" them, even though they know that clicking them would pay less, and that their optimal strategy was to just spam the highest paying door.

In the next experiment, he added a "revive", where you could click a door that disappeared and it'd come back. So in this case, people shouldn't waste their clicks saving doors, as it only takes one click to bring it back. He did find that people were no longer saving the shrinking doors, but they were still "reviving" disappeared doors as soon as they disappeared, even though they weren't using them, and even though they could have revived them at any other time with no loss.

One of the things he wanted to illustrate with this experiment is the irrational nature of people to keep doors open, even at the expense of better things, and even when the doors aren't really closing. That was definitely the biggest lesson I learned in 440 - as we spent so much time trying to keep our options open, to avoid having to refactor later, that we never really committed to an implementation until far too late into the project.

So back to the culling thought.

On Friday, I went to a bar with some friends, including one who I consider a very good friend. A couple of drinks later, and I found myself pushing him into doing something that he wasn't very keen to do. Morning after, and much more sober, I suddenly got this horrible feeling in my gut that my actions the night before might have caused this friend to hate me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about it, and in the end I decided to email him and apologise. Luckily, he forgave me, but that horrible feeling really stuck to me. I felt like I had just narrowly avoided falling off a cliff.

Is that how you decide who is a friend that you want to keep? You try and picture how you would feel if they absolutely hated you and never wanted to have anything to do with you ever again.

In regards to the friendship debt point, Gerald pointed out that debt is perceived, and you might feel like you did someone a favour and that they owe you, but they might just see it as a regular thing that isn't a big deal. So as these debts are never formally documented, there can be a skewed perception of who owes who what.

In the case of this hypothetical hate method, how much I am willing to invest in this friendship should be related to how horrible I would feel if that person hated me. I think this way you are only as invested as you feel you should be, and you have no resentment that you are putting in more or less than the other person. It could be a self-regulating method assuming if the other party starts pulling away as they feel like they are not getting as much out of the friendship, this will cause you to feel non-hypothetically terrible, and so you will put more effort into the relationship - if that feeling of terribleness is enough to motivate you. If you put in too much effort, you will not feel so terrible at the idea of losing them, and so you can relax a bit.