The Friendship Quiz
Eight true or false statements about friendship, each one checked against research. Open to everyone.
Eight statements about friendship. Some are true and some are false. Pick an answer to see what the research says.
Most people have around 50 very close friends.
Research led by Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford suggests our closest circle holds about five people. Wider circles hold about 15, 50 and 150 people, and each circle is a little less close than the one inside it.
Source: Your Brain Limits You to Just Five BFFs, MIT Technology Review (2016)
It takes more than 200 hours together to become close friends.
A University of Kansas study by Jeffrey Hall found it takes about 50 hours to go from stranger to casual friend, about 90 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends.
Source: How to make friends? Study reveals how many hours it takes, University of Kansas (2018)
Strong friendships and social ties make no real difference to how long people live.
A review of 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people found that people with stronger social relationships were 50% more likely to survive over the course of the studies.
Source: Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review, PLOS Medicine (2010)
You are far more likely to laugh when you are with other people than when you are on your own.
Laughter is around 30 times more likely with other people than alone. A study led by Robin Dunbar also found that people put up with more discomfort after laughing together, which suggests laughter helps bring people closer.
Source: Dunbar and others, Social laughter and pain thresholds, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2011)
Close friends tend to react in similar ways when they watch the same videos.
Scientists scanned the brains of students while they watched short video clips. The brain responses of friends were more alike than those of people further apart in the same social group.
Source: Similar neural responses predict friendship, Nature Communications (2018)
In the United States, fewer people said they had no close friends in 2021 than in 1990.
It went the other way. In 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. In 2021 the figure was 12%.
In the same US survey, work was the most common place people had met a close friend.
Of the people with close friends, 54% had met one through work, either their own workplace or their partner's. School came next, at 47%.
National Best Friends Day and the United Nations International Day of Friendship are on the same day.
They are different days. National Best Friends Day is on 8 June. The United Nations chose 30 July as the International Day of Friendship.
Source: Friendship Day, Wikipedia
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