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Researchers have proven a strong mother-daughter bond through cell phone conversations
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
Recent studies have shown that the frequency of contact between individuals is a reliable indicator of the emotional connection between them. It is therefore not surprising that mobile phone call data is a treasure trove of information about people's social lives.
Unfortunately, the analysis of this information has not yielded any remarkable results so far. For example, the location data of the subscriber during a telephone conversation showed the complexity of his route. It is unlikely that this was a revelation for anyone.
Only now has something useful appeared. Vasil Palchikov from Aalto University (Finland), Albert-László Barabási from Northeastern University (USA) and Robin Dunbar from Oxford University (UK) studied data on calls between 1.4 million women and 1.8 million men from an unnamed European country. The subscribers called each other almost 2 billion times and sent about half a billion text messages. The scientists also received information about the age of these people, which allows them to understand how the number of calls changes with age.
The researchers began by determining who the subscriber called most often, who was in second place, and so on. The first received the title of best friend, the other - the second best friend, etc. It turned out that for 18-40 year olds, the "best friend" for both men and women was more often of the opposite sex (of course, because this is the most reproductive age). The "second best friend" was of the same sex as the subscriber.
Women of these years paid more attention to relationships with the opposite sex than men. At the end of the reproductive period, they switched to persons who were younger than them by about a quarter of a century. Experts suspect that these are their daughters who have begun to bear grandchildren. Men at this age evenly "smear" their attention between "friends" of both sexes - probably do not differentiate between sons and daughters.
According to these data, women's socialization depends more on the ability to produce offspring. Until forty, women actively seek a sexual partner (or its psychological equivalent, let's call it that), and then get involved in raising grandchildren. In other words, they raise someone their entire lives. Men, on the other hand, are "philosophical" about this.
This confirms the hypothesis held by evolutionary biology that the main role in social relations is played by the bond between mothers and daughters, while the bond between men and women, fathers and sons is not so strong.
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