Uh Oh, You Can Only Have 5 Best Friends At One Time (According To Science)

Sorry to crush your #squadgoals, but research has shown that our puny brains can only handle five best friendships at one time.

According to the MIT Technology Review, experts started to look into this concept back in the 1990s. A British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar, who was studying chimpanzees at the time, noticed that there was a connection between the size of the apes' brains and the size of their friend groups — specifically, the bigger the brain, the more friends the chimp had. 

"The explanation seemed reasonable: animals with bigger brains can remember, and therefore interact meaningfully with, more of their peers," wrote the Review. 

After conducting research related to this theory, Dunbar concluded that humans can have no more than 150 people in their "social sphere" because of the size of our neocortex. And out of these 150 acquaintances, 50 of them make it to the "friends" level; 15 make it to the "good friends" level; and finally five out of all those people make it to the "besties" level.

While hard evidence of this theory has been hard to gather, the Review said Dunbar and a few of his peers were able to analyze over six million phone calls between 35 million people in an unnamed European country in 2007 (before social media and cell phones were really a thing). They looked at the frequency of phone calls between two people, assuming that their relationship was stronger the more they called each other.

The results of this study showed that the people had, on average, 4.1 best friendships, 11 good friendships, 29.8 friendships, and 128.9 acquaintances — which is pretty close to Dunbar's original conjecture.

We'd love to see a new study done on these levels of friendships now that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are pretty much the only way we stay in touch with our friend groups anymore. 

But for now, it's pretty safe to assume that you've got between 4.1 and 5 besties. If anyone gives you flak for flaking on a friendship, just blame science! (And your brain's limited real estate.)