Most people now only have 2 friends — Facebook

counted as close friends or confidantes is going down.
A researcher has found that the friends people feel they can confide in has shrank to two, down from three almost 25 years ago.

But according to Matthew Brashears from the University of Cornwell, although this shrinking social network ‘makes us potentially more vulnerable, we’re not as socially isolated as scholars had feared’.
For his study, Mr Brashears used data from a nationally representative experiment.

More than 2 000 adults ages 18 and older were surveyed from the nationally representative Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) programme.
Mr Brashears found that ‘modern discussion networks have decreased in size, which is consistent with other researchers’ findings, but that social isolation has not become more prevalent’.

When asked to list the names of people they had discussed ‘important matters’ with over the previous six months, about 48 percent of participants listed one name, 18 percent listed two, and roughly 29 percent listed more than two names for these close friends.

On average, participants had 2,03 confidantes.
And just over four percent of the participants did not list any names.

Female participants and those who were educated were the least likely to report no names on their confidante list.
The study also found that the number of people who have no confidantes, or the socially isolated, has not increased over the same amount of time, despite the fact the friends list has shrunk.

An earlier study – in 2006 – wrongly predicted that between 1985 and 2004, the social isolation of Americans would triple.
But they did correctly predict that the average size of our group of confidantes would shrunk by about one-third.

Mr Brashears told LiveScience: ‘Rather than our networks getting smaller overall, what I think may be happening is we’re simply classifying a smaller proportion of our networks as suitable for important discussions.

“This is reassuring in that it suggests that we’re not becoming less social.”
The study will be published in the journal Social Networks. – AP.