Book Notes: Robin Dunbar — Friends

From kindergarten to the nursing home, friends are some of the most important relationships in our lives. This becomes painfully apparent in our current times when many of us had either too little or too much contact with our friends. This book opened my eyes to the many dimensions of friendships and the fundamental role friends play in shaping who we are as individuals and as a species.

The Book

Dunbar, R (2021): Friends — Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. London, UK: Little, Brown Book Group

Review

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 obvious to everyone now that we had to spend a long time either relatively isolated from our friends or cooped up with a few of…