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People put most of their efforts in communicating and staying in touch with just handful of close friends and family, according to a new study. They also follow operating unconscious 1-in, 1-out policies that keeps the communication pattern remain same even when their friendship changes.

"Although social communication is now easier than ever, it seems that our capacity for maintaining emotionally close relationships is finite," said Felix Reed-Tsochas, James Martin Lecturer in Complex Systems at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford in a press release.

"While this number varies from person to person, what holds true in all cases is that at any point individuals are able to keep up close relationships with only a small number of people, so that new friendships come at the expense of 'relegating' existing friends."

As a part of the study, mobile phone records of 24 students in UK were taken into considerations for over 18 months. In these months they were also making the transition from school to university work.

The general pattern that researchers discovered, however, varied on an individual level. In majority of the cases small number of top-ranked, emotionally close people received relatively too large fraction of calls.

"As new network members are added, some old network members are either replaced or receive fewer calls," added Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford in the press release. "This is probably due to a combination of limited time available for communication and the great cognitive and emotional effort required to sustain close relationships. It seems that individuals' patterns of communication are so prescribed that even the efficiencies provided by some forms of digital communication (in this case, mobile phones) are insufficient to alter them."

The research titled 'The persistence of social signatures in human communication' has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.