The average person actually doesn’t know as many people in a personal way as you may think they do. We have done some original research and data analysis to answer this question specifically in order to give you an exact answer.

Answer:

According to original research and data analysis, the average person knows about 20 people in a very personal manner. However, the average person does know just over 150 people on a much less acquainted level.

Let’s find out how we got to this answer of how many people the average person knows!

In this original research, we took a survey of nearly 200 people and found that the average person knows more than 150 people personally. More than that, however, the average person knows between 0 and 50 people. There are usually many nuances and variables to this sort of topic, so in this article we are going to look at some of those details.

For those who answered the survey that they know more than 150 people; they may have been thinking about acquaintances that they don’t truly know. There is a certain level of ambiguity when it comes to the parameters of this question innately. For this reason, the expected number in this category is most likely lower than the data collection actually shows due to this confounding variable.

A person doesn’t actually know another individual if they are simply friends on Facebook, or have exchanged pleasantries in passing one time. This is surely what some of the people in this category of answer had believed to be the case within this questionnaire.

This means that if we are asking the question “How many people does the average person know in any way?”, the answer would be just over 150 people.

While only 25% of people answered 0-25 and 19% of people answered 25-50, the combination of these two closely related answers proves to take up the most space in the data set when compared to the rest of the answer categories. A whopping 44.8% of the people in this questionnaire answered that they know 0-50 people personally.

When we compare this number to the 37.6% of people who say they know more than 150 people, we can see that more people fit this category than the higher category. It is pretty safe to say that this number better represents the average person’s number of personal friendships.

Taking into consideration that the data was skewed slightly towards the 0-25 people category, we can say that the average number of people that a person knows in a personal manner is around 20 people. We would assume it to be 25 people if these two categories of answer were split evenly down the middle.

When we separate the data set into two groups (under 100 & over 100) we see that more people know less than 100 people than claim to know over 100. This difference is slight, but it is still visible, and not small enough to be considered negligible. Within this article, more people know less than 100 people than those that know more than 200 people.

This actually adds to the validity of the result that more people know 0-50 people personally than those who chose the 150+ option in the questionnaire. While it would be easy to look at the numbers and assume that the average person knows more than 150 people, it is crucial to take into consideration any and all variables that you can.

After looking at all of this information and data, it is safe to assume that the average person knows around 20 people in a more personalized manner.

PEW Research Center:

This resource, PEW Research Center, applies similar polling methods and research in order to tackle difficult questions and analyze trends. They are a non-profit organization that also views their organization as an objective “nonadvocacy” based resource. The topics that are under analysis at PEW are nearly unlimited and included subjects such as race, religion, politics, habits, and more.

The origination of this research center was birthed out of a research project named “Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press” in 1990. It was officially started in 2004 as a result.

Resources such as this can often be used to understand topics like this one better, but the answer that we have found from sites such as this, Quora, and The New York Times is around 600 people. We do not believe that the average person knows 600 people in a personal and real manner, and thus we decided to do our own original research on the topic.

How Many Faces Can the Average Person Recognize?

On October 9th, 2018, Science.org published an article stating that the average human is able to remember and recognize around 5,000 faces. Being that the average adult can remember 1,000 to 10,000 faces; this put the average at around 5,000. This was deemed as a “Facial vocabulary” by the scientists involved in the study.

This information makes it clear that the average person is easily able to know and remember over 150 people on an acquaintance level, even given that most of the faces recognized by each person will be people they have never met before. People from TV, social media, and more will also fit within this category. However, there is still a great deal of room to fit the 150 people into this facial vocabulary.

How Many Names can the Average Person Remember?

It is said that the average person can learn and remember around 20,000 to 35,000 words in order to be deemed as a native speaker in their language. There are many people in the world who, not only know more than this in their own original language, but also know several other languages fluently. There are more than a couple of Youtubers that make content by knowing 5-8 languages and talking to people in different parts of the world.

Taking this information, we could say that these people have learned and memorized a minimum of 100,000 words. Most likely the count is up around 200,000 to 250,000 words, however.

Being able to learn and remember over 200,000 words, the average person can certainly remember many names of people that they know personally and make the correlation between these words that give meaning to someone and their face.

One person can surely remember around 250,000 words if they spend enough time and effort learning them in their lifetime.

The Internet & Americans:

Adults in America spend a great deal of time on social media platforms and other technologies such as TV, streaming services, video games, texting, and more. This, of course, will greatly impact the number of people that the average American can know. However, the number of contacts in a person’s phone doesn’t equate to how many people they truly know on a personal level, as we found out earlier in this article.

If we are limiting the variables and narrowing our question into how many people the average person or American knows personally, the number is still going to be minimally affected by these technological means; even though they have the opportunity to impact it. In most cases it will be unaffected.

Recap & Summary:

Now you know how many people the average person knows on a personal level. The numbers are so interesting to look at, and considering the percent of people that know so few people in a personal manner; it actually makes a lot of sense. How people view friendship and the ability to say that they know someone will always affect this overall number, but in general people will usually know around 20 people in a very personal manner within their lives.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading this article and learning something new with us through this original research. If you did and you want to see more original research and fun topics just like this, you can find many more on our website right here in our Original Research Category.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! : )