Why popularity peaks at 25

Washington - You’re never more popular than you are at age 25.

Credit: REUTERS

At the age of 25 we have more people to socialize with.

Or at least that’s the age when we tend to have the most people in our real-life social networks, according to research recently published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Researchers analysed one full year’s worth of cellphone call records for 3.2 million customers of a European telecom company.

They found that the average number of people a person calls (or is called by) in a given month peaks around age 25.

After that, your number of regular social connections nosedives until age 45 or so.

“One important conclusion we can draw is that the average number of contacts is quite modest; in most cases, people focus their (phone-based) social effort each month on around 15 people. They note that this corresponds to the number of friends and family members people typically have face-to-face interactions with in a given month.

“Thus, we provide some evidence that the use of mobile phone technology does not change our social world,” the researchers write.

Recent years have seen the rise of a hot-take industry dedicated to the notion that cellphones are making us less social or killing face-to-face interactions or otherwise radically altering our lives, usually for the worse. But this study doesn’t find a whole lot of evidence for any of that.

When viewed through their cellphone records, people’s lives tend to follow a particular narrative arc; a period of “social promiscuity” and exploding social contacts in the late teens and early 20s, followed by a rapid narrowing of the social sphere from the late 20s through early middle age as people marry, have kids, and otherwise settle down.

Interestingly, the researchers found that men tended to have more social contacts than women in their 20s.

But around 39 or so that dynamic flipped, and women had more social contacts for the remainder of their lives.

“The difference between the sexes seems to be primarily owing to the more frequent interactions by the females with their adult children and the children’s spouses,” the researchers posit.

Washington Post

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