Friendships, longevity and social networks

It has been shown that both people and baboons show a positive correlation of lifespan to friendships. Although friendships is a difficult parameter to pin down, it appears that stronger and deeper ties are more important than breadth and volume of relationships. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense as deep friendly ties help humanoids weather stress better and stress is negatively correlated with lifespan. However, if this is the case, the effect of social networking...