Facebook friends are expendable

Jonah Lehrer dissects whether you would throw your 300th facebook friend from the train to save one of your "real" friends.

Fascinating.

I'm not on Facebook, so take what follows with a hefty pinch of salt, but there's some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook "page" and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren't used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions.