New study finds you don’t have nearly as many friends as you think you do

It was so much easier to work out who your true friends were back when we all had Top 16s on Bebo...

A new study conducted by researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that only half of the people we'd call our friends would say the same about us. The team studied 600 friendship surveys taken in Israel, and found that 95% of people believe that their friendships are reciprocal - we believe that the people we call our friends share those feelings towards us. Empirical evidence suggests that this isn't the case, with only 50% of all those polled matching up in the 'bidirectional friendship category'. Dr. Erez Shmueli, one of the scientists who carried out the research, said that these findings are significant because they prove that "we learned that we can't rely on our instincts or intuition," when it comes to knowing who sees us as a friend. It's pretty disconcerting to think that as many as half of the people would count among our friends would simply brush over us when asked to name their own friends. This is definitely one to raise in your WhatsApp group-chat later on.