The Science of Social Networking

“Add me on Facebook! Follow me on Twitter! Subscribe to my YouTube channel!” I’m sure everyone one of us has said at least one of those three phrases. Those are the go to sites when we turn on our computers. Social Networking has become an integral part of present day society. Teachers, organizations, and companies have Twitters and Facebook pages for us to “follow” and “like”. Bet you didn’t know that our school has a Twitter. So what is it exactly that makes social networking so addicting? Why do we find ourselves spending countless hours staring at news feeds, even if we aren’t talking to anyone (just stalking others via the internet – you know you do it)?
For some reason we have the desire to splatter our lives all over the internet, secretly counting how many people like the status or retweet the tweet. When we go on vacation or a birthday party, we all just have to document the experience by taking an excess amount of photos only to post them on Facebook for all of your “friends” to see. However, whether you know it or not, Facebook is helping you with more than just procrastinating on your homework.

“New research confirms that social complexity enriches cognitive growth. Could having more Facebook friends actually make you smarter (Johnson 1)?” In this article from Scientific American, Johnson references back to the hunter-gatherer societies that us humans used to live in. Those of whose populations ranged from 150-200 people, due to our social nature. Jump into the 21^st century and 200 people in a population looks like an exponentially small number compared to the thousands of people we see in our everyday environments. He then goes on to talk about the Social Brain Hypothesis that Robin Dunbar created in the 1990s. He hypothesized that “the demands of group living resulted in a selection pressure that promoted the expansion of neocortical growth.” The neocortex is mostly composed of gray matter that makes up the outermost rim of our brains. Dunbar’s discoveries showed that mammals who lived in large social groups had larger neocortex to brain ratio.

“Primates, and humans in particular, are such good social cooperators because we can empathize with others and coordinate our activities to build consensus. It is what also makes us so remarkably deceitful, allowing us to manipulate other members of our group by intentionally making them think we will behave one way when our actual plans are quite different. A successful primate is therefore one who can keep track of these subtle details in behavior and anticipate their potential outcome (Johnson 1).”

However, the question that they had to answer was whether or not it was the social networks that led to the neocortical growth, or vice versa. This new study, involving rhesus macaques, confirmed that the larger social networks correlated to an increase in the gray matter. “Their analysis revealed a clear, linear relationship between the size of a monkey’s social network and an increase of neocortical gray matter in regions involved with social cognition (Johnson 1).” Interestingly enough, the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, in which researchers compared the differences between people and the number of online friends, real-world friends, and the size of the neocortical brain regions associated with social behavior, showed a distinct correlation between the volume of 3 gray matter regions and the number of Facebook friends that individual had.

To read the rest of the article and about the actual experiment, click the links provided in this post.