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Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by [Robin Dunbar]

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Robin Dunbar

Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships Kindle Edition

by Robin Dunbar (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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'Fascinating...In essence, the number and quality of our friendships may have a bigger influence on our happiness, health and mortality risk than anything else in life save for giving up smoking' Guardian, Book of the Day

Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking.

Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.

Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded.

Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, Robin Dunbar has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends.

Print length

476 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date

March 4, 2021
File size

1298 KB
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Kat Vellos
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Robin Dunbar
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A fascinating study of friendship―Rachel Cooke, Observer

Friends offers poignant observations about how we have evolved to rely on one another for help and companionship - and how these bonds make our lives meaningful―Clea Skopeliti, The i

A timely arrival―Sheon Han, Atlantic --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist and former director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. His acclaimed books include How Many Friends Does One Person Need? and Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, described by Malcolm Gladwell as "a marvellous work of popular science." --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08W4XPK7G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown Book Group (March 4, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 4, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1298 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 476 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #372,309 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #355 in Friendship (Books)
- #1,807 in Healthy Relationships (Kindle Store)
- #1,990 in Parenting & Relationships (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
104 ratings

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4.3 out of 5

104 global ratings

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4 star		22%
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2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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A. Frederick

Rich Detail of Friendships

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 21, 2023

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Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar’s number fame, provides a comprehensive and wide ranging look at friendship across many dimensions. As our society struggles to be socially connected in a polarized and technology obsessed era, Dunbar’s book is a good reference for how and why friendship matters in a wide variety of contexts.

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David Phillips

Academic, dry, and repetitive

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 1, 2023

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[EDIT: Raised overall rating from 1 to 3 stars. Seems fairer. As a survey of the literature on one's span of friendships, the book does a satisfactory job. That was just not what I expected or wanted.]

The New York Time blurb on the cover says, "The secrets of lasting friendships." Wrong! No secrets, no advice, no tips, no help. This academic, dry, and repetitive book hammers on one theme: in general, people have about 150 friends. Oh, and by the way, having a good number of friends seems to help our physical, mental, and emotional health.

Well, yeah! That's why I was interested in a book that might have revelations about finding, making, and keeping friends. I should have paid attention to the reviews, which seem to have been written by colleagues or others in the field of psychology. This academic book plows the field of other writings and findings on friendships and other aggregations of people. It goes over and over the same ground—a dry, dusty experience.

One person found this helpful

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AmazonCustomer

Exquisite

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 21, 2021

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and it added tremendous depth to my own research into the topic of adult friendship. Interestingly, the author doesn't delineate between friends and family; he counts family members when assessing people's friendship circles and social life.

The book is exquisitely plump with quantitative and scientific data on the nature of connection. This will be a fascinating read for other nerds like me who love poring over reams of behavioral science, psychological, and social science research studies. Highly recommend for people who geek out on the topic of friendship and human connection.

— Kat Vellos, author of "We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships"
(Note: I purchased this from another bookseller.)

9 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Really interesting book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 26, 2021

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This book me quite a long time to read not because wasn't interesting, in fact quite the opposite. It is full of incredibly deep drawer and insights gleaned over many years. Highly recommended for anyone interested in understanding human behaviour especially as it relates to friendship.

4 people found this helpful

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Richard Compean

The Science of Friendship

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 20, 2021

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This book confirms with behavioral science research what we know through our own experience. It is reassuring, helpful, and hopeful and has given me a fuller appreciation of the meaning and value of friendship.

2 people found this helpful

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Whit Sanders

Interesting, but overly focused on negative aspects.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2022

I learned about this book from reading David Brooks’ March 24, 2022 article, ‘The Secrets of Lasting Friendships’ in the NYTimes. I enjoyed reading the book, and the extensive research behind it is certainly praiseworthy, but I picked up far more useful info from just reading Brooks’ concise, two-page article. The book is overly focused on a long accounting of the deleterious consequences of deficient and dysfunctional friendships, which we all can already surmise. The NYT article concentrates on the positive and practical steps we can take to build enlightened, meaningful friendships. It’s a good example of how a journalist’s practiced communication skills can often trump a brilliant scientist’s research data.

5 people found this helpful

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Beverly

Excellent! Possibly too much data for some, but don't let that stop you

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 14, 2021

Fascinating, wonderfully well researched, easy to read for non-scientific types, full of valuable insights about friendship. Being so chock full of research data, it might drag in places if you tend to glaze over in response to facts and figures. I would suggest, read it anyway! Extremely worthwhile.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Joe Bathelt

A great book on a topic that is more important than ever

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 12, 2021

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In this book, eminent Professor Robin Dunbar discusses friendships. His treatise covers the evolutionary origin of friendship, the brain mechanisms of individual differences in social skills, differences in friendship style between men and women, changing friendships across the lifespan, differences in friendship between the online and real-world, among many other topics. The thorough look into friendship is both illuminating and refreshing. There are many books on the psychology of other relationships, e.g. between romantic partners, siblings, or parents and children, but friendships are a neglected topic. The great importance of friendship should be quite clear to everyone now that we had to spend a long time either relatively isolated from our friends or cooped up with a few of them. The book uncovers many of the behaviours that highlight why we may be friends with certain people, how we maintain friendships, and why some friendships break down. I found these discussions intellectually stimulating and practically important. The book is also very readable. There are many anecdotes and funny observations sprinkled in that make the more technical discussions more approachable. My only slight criticism is that there are some extrapolations, especially around gender differences and evolutionary psychology, that veer a bit too far from the supporting evidence for my taste. In sum, I think this book is great for anyone interested in psychology, human evolution, or behavioural economics.

8 people found this helpful

David J Warden

Very illuminating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 16, 2022

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This is the best book I have read on the topic of friendship, and I have read many. It's unique in looking at the anthropology of friendship and our social networks, based on research, rather than simply speculating philosophically about the topic. Dunbar explains the seven layers or concentric circles of friendship, and the seven pillars of friendship. These are not just made-up numbers but based on actual research and multiply-corroborated. It includes illuminating digressions into the behaviour of other primates, differences in friendship styles between women and men, brain chemistry and more. Highly recommended. It will help you to understand your own social network and how to manage it.

Mr Ali

Very time consuming but no conclusion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 15, 2021

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The book is full of research and different kind of studies but no conclusion and no summery which one can put into practice. It would have been better to write a short book with conclusion from all the data which has been put forward.

One person found this helpful

Miguel Flora

Very good. A comprehensive look towards relationships

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 8, 2021

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A comprehensive look towards relationships

H

Damaged product

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on March 6, 2022

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