Strong ties

Strong ties are the people we care about most

Strong ties are our closest friends and family. They are the people we trust the most, and the people we turn to for emotional support. Strong ties are very important for maintaining our wellbeing. Research has shown that people with strong ties have lower incidents of heart disease, and get fewer cases of colds and the flu.² Family members are disproportionately represented among our strong ties. Our strong ties include friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors, and family can sometimes represent up to half of our strong ties, despite there being many fewer family members than non-family members in our social network. When all else is equal, family gets preference.

Strong ties are often described as the people in our “inner circle.”

We only have a small number of strong ties

Most people have fewer than ten strong ties, and many have fewer than five. We keep our circles of trust very small. One study of 3,000 Americans found that they had between two and six strong ties.³ A study conducted in 2002 and 2007 found that people had about ten friends and family they meet or speak with at least weekly.⁴ Another study of 5,124 adults found that the average number of strong ties was eleven.⁴

Most of our communication is with strong ties

Studies into communication have found that the majority of communication is with the people who are emotionally closest to us, the people most likely to reciprocate our attention.⁵ On average, we have ongoing communication with between seven and fifteen people, but 80 percent of that is with the same five to ten people.⁶ Eighty percent of our phone calls are to the same four people.⁷ Aside from face to face interaction, people communicate with their strong ties primarily through voice calls and text messages, as they view those as being the most reliable communication channels. However, as more people use social networks, and more people have always-on access to social networks on their phones, communication with strong ties on social networks is increasing. Research on social networks has shown that they are primarily being used to strengthen existing relationships rather than build new relationships. In fact, the more people see each other in person and communicate on the phone, the more they communicate online.⁸

On average, people have 160 friends on Facebook yet communicate directly with only four to six of them.⁹ We consume updates from many more than that, but when it comes to wall posts, private messages, instant messages, likes, and comments on others’ posts, we only communicate with an average of four people per week and six people per month.⁹ This is despite the fact that we’re checking Facebook almost every day. Another research study tried to understand how many people we spend time with offline by analyzing the tags in Facebook photos. It found that the average person was tagged with six to seven other people.¹⁰ All this data on social network interaction closely reflects our offline life, where many of us have fewer than five strong ties. We’re communicating with the same small number of strong ties online as well as offline.¹¹

Our strong ties have disproportionate influence over us

Research on decision making has consistently found that we are disproportionately influenced by the people we’re closest to emotionally. The strongest influence is between mutual best friends.¹² We’re three to five times more likely to share similar preferences with our friends than with strangers.¹³ This is not new. Research on voting in the 1940s showed that people were much more heavily influenced by who their family and close friends were voting for than they were by the media.¹⁴ These patterns have held despite the vast changes in technology in the last 70 years. In independent studies, Forrester, Polara, and Edelman all found that people were three to four times more likely to trust a friend or acquaintance than a blogger or expert for product purchase advice.^{15, 16, 17} Research on social networks has shown that people only influence, and are influenced by, a small number of other people.¹⁸ Other research has shown that we are influenced by the people that surround us, which often tends to be our strongest ties.¹⁹

New tools will emerge around strong ties that will change how we buy things

We trust our strong ties, and are more likely to let them know intimate details of our life. This can include what we do, where we go, what we buy, and what we decide not to buy. Assuming they give us permission, in the future we’ll be able to see which of our friends have visited certain locations, stores, or websites, and what products or services they bought. We’ll be able to see how they rated the experience, and if they haven’t explicitly given a rating, we’ll be able to directly reach out to them and solicit advice about our potential purchases. All products and services will be filtered through the previous experiences of our friends.