You just can’t have more than 200 friends on Facebook, wanna bet?

The study, which was published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, shows that the number of “friends” on social media sites can be misleading.

When asked how many of their Facebook friends they would actually turn to in the event of an emergency, across the two surveys the numbers cited by the respondents were very low.

He also found that on average, Facebook users typically have around 150 friends. Perhaps remaining in line with that theme, he set out to understand how many individuals would really be there for us when we needed them. After a week without Facebook, participants in the HRI study reported 55% less stress than those who continued with normal use.

You can boast about your Facebook friend list as much as you want, but you don’t really have more than 200 friends.

It has been suggested that social media might overcome the constraints because posts, tweets and pictures allow us to talk to many more people at the same time, even if the interaction is not direct.

With the increase of social media and its users all around the world, face-to-face communication has also decreased, leading to the decay of friendships.

So the next time you reach out to Facebook for comfort, just remember that just a fraction of your friends will truly become that digital shoulder that you need to cry on. In fact, the study found that while genuine friendship could be aided with likes and pokes, they would die all the same without old fashioned human contact.

One person who has put the “Facebook friend” concept to the test is photographer Tanja Hollander.

Recent Facebook deactivator Nat Duncan told Fairfax how the pressure of diminishing friendships made her take a step back from the social media giant.

“Friendships, in particular, have a natural decay rate in the absence of contact, and social media may well function to slow down the rate of decay”, Dunbar wrote.

That’s because maintaining meaningful friendships, online and off, requires lots of time and mental effort.

The average person analyzed had about 150 friends, but “only 13.6 ever express sympathy” when something is going wrong, according to tech site Engadget. Technology that does a better job approximating face-to-face interactions might have a shot at growing real-life friend networks. The author collectively declares that there’s still the risk for friendships to die out eventually.