It is something of a surprise to me that social contact is so much fun and valuable. I don't think I heard that friendships would be so important while I was growing up. I read recently that human memory works on associations so that a comment or scene can stimulate very different ideas in people. So, a group's conversation is basically unpredictable. If I am with a group of people that like each other, the talk can go in many different directions.
If they don't like and accept each other, it is easy to get into lecturing back and forth. You don't like my position on extraterrestrial beings and you get the notion that if you just explain the overwhelming evidence that you know, you will help me see the light. Your fine explanation will deliver me from my situation of error while I find your recitation full of mistakes and want to counter each point you make with a correction.
How well one person knows another is murky. How many people one person knows is itself a rather open question. Back on Nov. 15, 2014, I posted a blog statement that I had read that most people know about 150 other people. When I just looked up "How many people does the average person know?", I found answers of 800 and 600. Of course, there are many ways to define knowing someone else and different definitions lead to different estimates. I doubt that overall social relations have changed much in five years.
Humans are a communicative bunch. It is said that writing was invented during the last 10,000 years but speech is trickier to gauge. Evidently, reasonable estimates range from 50,000 to 2,000,000 years ago. It is clear that our brains are modified to accommodate speech and we can convert both talk and writing to feelings and understandings of others and their lives. Talking or writing can give us a taste of the lives and circumstances and feelings of others we care about. It is quite possible that exchanging words in any way with others increases our interest and affection for them.
