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Making friends can seem easy when
you're young. You encounter more new people and have more free time when you're
first venturing out into the world than when you're more likely to be settled
down with a steady job, a long-term partner and children.
New research suggests that our social networks
may shrink from when we're about 25, after which we tend to lose more friends
and acquaintances than we gain. But there's also an important difference
between men and women, with men likely to make more contacts in their youth but
lose them more rapidly as they age.
The
study, carried out by scientists at Oxford and Aalto Universities and published
in Royal Society Open Science, looked at the phone call records of 3.2m mobile
users across in Europe. Collected in 2007, the data included the age and gender
of the mobile
users and the people they called, how often they called each
person and the length of each call.
Downhill
from 25
The
research showed that people aged 25 and under talked on their phones more than
any other age group, which suggests that people might become less socially
connected with age. This echoes other
research on face-to-face social networks that suggests that our
social networks shrink as we age.
The
big life events that usually come with age, such as marriage and parenthood,
lead people to invest more of their time socializing with just a few close
family members and friends. Later in life, retirement, health issues and the
death of partners and friends can leave people socially isolated, although this
can sometimes inspire older people to engage more with their
community through volunteering and religious participation.
But
there could be other explanations for the fact that older people
tend to call fewer friends on their mobiles. For one thing, older adults
use mobile technology far less than younger people, and the new study didn't
capture data on landline phone calls and meeting in person.
Things
also get more complex when you look at the data by gender. Among the under 40s,
men contacted more people than women, but after 40 this gender difference
reversed. And even though younger men made calls to more people than women,
women spent more time talking to the people they called.
Again,
these patterns mirror what we've learned from studying other kinds of social interaction, including face-to-face meetings. Women tend to invest more
time in one-on-one interactions with others, whereas men tend to prefer
interacting in groups. Our evolutionary roots may drive these differences: In
our evolutionary history, females relied on their partners and a few key people
to assist with child rearing, whereas males were attracted to larger groups
that could help with hunting.
The
other pattern that emerged from studying the mobile phone
records was in the people receiving the calls. Under 40s most often made calls
to people their own age, while those aged 50 and older frequently called people
a generation younger than them. The researchers speculated that this may be the
result of older adults mostly using mobile phones to call their adult children
- who may have even bought their parents their mobile phones.
Perhaps
unsurprisingly, each person's most frequent and longest calls tended to be with
an opposite-sex person who was the same age - most likely their partner. Taken
together, these findings suggest that people were socializing the most with
their partners and family members, particularly in older
generations.
Changing
communication
There
are limits to what mobile phone data can tell us about people's
relationships. In this case, the researchers could only speculate about whom
participants were contacting based on their age and gender. Mobile phone use
has changed dramatically in the years since these data was collected, and
people increasingly use messaging apps such as WhatsApp to communicate. And
even though people frequently socialize on their mobile phones, our screen time
still only represents a small sliver of our social behaviour.
But
this research does suggest that the way we use our mobile devices to connect
with others changes throughout our lives, in much the same way other forms of
social behaviour do. Humans have a strong need to seek connections with each
other but we adapt the way we fulfill this need to our changing life
circumstances.
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