Oxford University researchers found maintaining friendships requires more brain power.
Their study concluded that people with real friends have to use more cognitive skills to understand what someone else thought.
This, however, did not occur with "online" friends, such as those made on social networking sites including Facebook or Twitter.
The Daily Telegraph reported that scientists discovered a link between the number of friends people had and the size of their orbital prefrontal cortex, which is a region of the brain found just above the eyes.
The conclusions, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows for the first time that competency in social skills is determined by the size of peoples' brains.
"We found that individuals who had more friends did better on mentalising tasks and had more neural volume in the orbital frontal cortex, the part of the forebrain immediately above the eyes," said Prof Robin Dunbar, who led the study.w that the relationship between brain size and social network size is mediated by mentalising skills.
"What this tells us is that the size of your brain determines your social skills, and it is these that allow you have many friends."
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