It’s a common enough experience to warrant another social media study. Despite your hundreds—or even thousands—of connections on social networking sites, most people tend to invest the majority of their time on just a small number of friends, says a new Oxford University study. And in an effort to avoid relationship overload, we often make room for new friends by devoting less time to others in our social circles. Over an 18-month period, researchers followed 24 students during their transition from high school to college or the workforce, a period when relationships are typically in flux. Using a combination of cell phone data and corresponding surveys, the experts tracked students’ communication patterns and created ranking systems for members of each student’s social network based on emotional closeness. The data also revealed how much effort students put into maintaining their close relationships: what the authors called a “social signature”. “We don’t know for sure, but it’s probably that we develop or have a personal social style, some elements of which could be genetically inherited, like personality traits,” says study co-author Robin Dunbar, PhD, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. While students’ levels of emotional closeness to different friends tended to change over time, their general communication patterns stayed the same. In other words, students wouldn’t invest more time on their relationships overall just because they made new friends. Instead, they’d just invest less time in other relationships. That might sound like a bummer at first. (Whatever happened to making new friends, but keeping the old?) But you shouldn’t feel too bad, since most of us trade one friend for another unconsciously. Likely, it’s just because we don’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with everyone—even with the help of modern stay-in-touch technology like texting, videochatting, and social media, the study authors say. Instead of silently fretting (or fuming) about what seems to be a fading relationship, cut your friend some slack. Realize she’s probably just caught up in other stuff—then just give her a call to break the pattern.
