10 ms·

Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas

95 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

HidyBush 5y ago
I always find it worrying how companies and institutions completely disregard advances in psychological findings. How can anyone in good faith develop a social network after knowing this concrete reality of human connection capacity? How can anyone in good faith defend massive amounts of wealth when phenomena related to hedonic adaptation clearly exist? How can anyone in good faith make their company public after more than 100 years of seeing shareholders take control of the original vision guided by a poor understanding of what a stock's value means (clear example of a metric turned target)? Humans have always been the same, both in their individual and group form, and good leaders from 4000 years ago would fare just as well today if given the right context. Ignoring the history of human behavior means actively disregarding the most powerful tool to understand what stuff works for us and what doesn't. We are forgetting that the vast majority of our activities involves other humans, and 100% of what we do involves ourselves. When creating technology used by groups of people or when making up policies we should be more careful about shaping it from a behavioral point of view rather than a purely technical one. If Facebook was designed from a more human perspective and the like button functioned 38% of the times we would be in a much better state than the like button being formally proven to always work and social interactions working 38% of the time
- billfruit 5y ago
  Problem may be that there is too much experimental psychology work whose results don't mean anything. To me any argument that is built upon the results of experimental psychology looks rather suspect.
  - HidyBush 5y ago
    I am talking about broad foundational results. Of course stuff like "we asked two teams of people to tug on a rope, the first had a prime number of members and had been told their pet dog died last night whereas the other followed a keto diet" don't really matter in the real world. If an analysis on 6 billion phone interactions tells us people don't meaningfully deal with more than 150 other humans then it's something you should actually take into consideration when designing social stuff
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      I dont think there are any broad foundational results, nor do I think there is a social science possible. Social systems are chaotic, and extremely multi-casual, and extremely uncontrollable (in the sense of being able to isolate one cause). Under these conditions there is no scientific method. Anything called a science is just a ritualized imitation. The world does not owe us it being intelligible to us; the success of science in being able to engineer trinkets has fooled us for the past 300 years -- the vast majority of the whole of reality is unknowable -- as in, there is no method which could produce a theory of it (in the strong sense). I think apparently quantitative or "theoretical" results from social sciences are more like curios which could inspire some speculative designs for social institutions. They arent theories (as in science) by which we can engineer institutions. Treating anything in social science as more than some ancient form of zoology, that is, some local observations jotted down by an aristocrat -- is a recipe for disaster. Outside the physics lab, the entire world is an infinite zoo with no grand discernable patterns.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - pawelmurias 5y ago
      How do you imagine this bit of research to be be taken into account? I would be shocked if facebook didn't have specific research on how people interact on facebook rather than having to depend on some vague general observation.
- genmon 5y ago
  (Post author here) Engelbart's team (the one that came up with the personal computer back in 68) was a combination of engineers and psychologists, and I think there's something really powerful about that. It's not about the psychological results specifically, it's more about integrating the psychological perspective during product discovery. So what is the equivalent 50 years on? Maybe sociologists could be hired as PMs, or anthropologists in R&D (I know Microsoft and Intel are really good at this, but I mean for smaller, sub-1000 person firms). I wonder what those blended teams would come up with.
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  Advances in findings have indeed been ignored, since Dunbar's number has been discredited yet people continue to recognize it as legitimate. I think it's an incredibly dangerous idea which has convinced a lot of people to run to their chains. See Graeber and Wengrow research cited here https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080 https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080
  - taink 5y ago
    The research cited here seems to follow previous conclusions concerning the fact that the largest groups could go up to 2000 individuals. In fact, this is mentioned in page 6 of Dunbar's paper[1] so I fail to see how that invalidates anything about this theory. Perhaps have I missed something? [1]: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf#page=6 https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199...
    - wahnfrieden 5y ago
      Thank you for discussing the actual research (on one side at least). My understanding is that Graeber and Wengrow are saying that the "band" grouping is inaccurate nonsense, that "band" relations can extend to several thousand people without "tribal society" necessarily emerging >The “Personal Social Group” = 150 people (bands of common lineage — what Dunbar believed to be the biggest group of people one person can have close relationships with). The “Clan” = 450-500 people (cohesive sub tribal unit). The “Tribal Group” = 1500 — 2000 people (tribe). Many people use Dunbar's number to justify why larger societies of humans must necessarily require bureaucracy, coercion under threat of violence, etc. to scale beyond a couple hundred people and that any alternative to the power structures we have today is unrealistic fantasy. It's one key to capitalist realism
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  "Humans have always been the same" It may be true that modern life (be it Industrial age or Information age for your demarcation) is evolutionarily short, remember that the rules of environmentally-triggered gene expression can effectively result in "evolved behavior" faster than actual mutation gathering. If gene expression is adaptable to social conditions, and social conditions produce the same pattern of gene expression across generations, then the functional organisms: shape, weight, aggressiveness, psychology produced by the pattern of gene expression WILL change on a large scale. So you could do psychological/anthropological behavioral studies for "modern" humans in "modern" life, if they aren't doing cross-cultural comparisons, and "universal psychological truths" won't be universal. The big question to me personally is if you have sustained centuries of, let's say, "capitalism-based selection", how much drift is there? Capitalism undeniably rewards certain sociopathic traits that really are only applicable to modern times: plenty of resources, availability of technology, etc. We're probably at the tail end of a long run of "plenty".
AndrewOMartin 5y ago
Silly headline. > Dunbar’s number, 150, is the natural size of human social groups. Presumably human language gives us a 2.8x boost over other primates.
- isitmadeofglass 5y ago
  There is nothing silly about the headline. It’s a perfect tie in to the text of the article.
  - AndrewOMartin 5y ago
    It might have just caught me in a sour mood.
deepsun 5y ago
> Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men False. There are a lot of units, one can certainly pick some of them of about 150 size. But there's no reason to call it "basic". Smallest unit is 1 person. Smallest group you can find is 2 person (e.g. operators of an ATGM).
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Yes, in modern warfare. But it used to be somewhat more true in the time before modern firearms, when battles were fought in close order formations. Even now, a company in many militaries seems like the smallest unit that's somehow "self-contained" or capable of independent operation and logistics in a way neither a platoon or a battalion does. It's probably also not entirely a coincidence that a lot of military fiction seems to focus on a company or a company-sized unit.
  - juki 5y ago
    > Even now, a company in many militaries seems like the smallest unit that's somehow "self-contained" or capable of independent operation and logistics in a way neither a platoon or a battalion does. Do you have company and battalion mixed up here? Why wouldn't a battalion, which consists of companies, be capable of independent operation if the individual companies are?
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      My wording was clumsy, what I meant is that a company, rather than a battalion, is the smallest somewhat independent unit, in some way more "basic" than the latter.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    Fuller quote: > Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men: This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104 BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century. And I'm actively against the statement that number 150 is relevant because of all-to-all communication pattern. In army (as well as emergency responders like firefighters) all-to-all communication is actively forbidden, and only possible for groups of 3-6 people of similar ranks/positions. All other communications must go either up or down the authority chain.
dalbasal 5y ago
So... I think Dunbar's number exemplifies a failing in our social science culture, or maybe our epistemological tendencies. .. or maybe it just shows what happens when MBA texbooks adopt something. We don't really know what to do with a piece of insight or knowledge like Dunbar's number. When is it "true?" When is it relevant? What does it say about how we should organize? What does it say about how organisations of different sizes function? What kind of successes or failures does Dunbar's nunber suggest we encounter. I'm not saying that Dunbar's number is wrong. I'm suggesting that for it to be profound in a scientific sense, it needs to have consequences. Prediction, prescription, insight about existing structures, something. We intuitively agree that working at an 80 person company is different from an 800 person could company. I don't see Dunbar's theories adding much beyond that, no predictions or insights about how such organisations work. Mostly it's a piece of theory that can be thrown onto slides, in support or objection to something as needed. Is there a there, there? Do I have this wrong?
- bjelkeman-again 5y ago
  My experience from the army, a startup growing to 100 or so (majority remote, or local offices), hanging out in online communities which grow beyond 120, is that around 100-130 it gets hard to keep track of all the people and have some emotional relationship. Without that relationship it gets harder for me to care about the progress the group makes as a unit. Interestingly enough, for me it is based on context. It is ok to have 100 people in the company, 100 people in an online community and 100 people in an off line community, all at the same time, and still keep track and have some kind of relationship. When a context grows too large it doesn’t seem to affect the other contexts.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    I agree that there are elements like this that make intuitive sense. What I am saying is: After at these years on military/boardroom slides... what does Dunbar's tell us? How has it influenced how we do anything? What should or shouldn't be organized in smaller/larger groups? How? It just feels like a lot of popular social science tidbits give us a great introduction with no follow through. What was the point of all those slides?
0des 5y ago
Titles are getting really weird and out of hand these days.
snvzz 5y ago
What an extremely annoying oscillating background color. Had to screw with the page to disable it.
lkrubner 5y ago
While Dunbar's number is useful, keep in mind that the average person is aware of several thousand other people, and it is that larger number that really makes human society different from ape society. As a test, I once spent a day writing down every person I knew. I included real people, such as friends of mine, and celebrities, such as Beyonce and John Lennon, and also fictional characters such as God, Moses, Gandalf, Sauron and King Arthur -- these are all people who function as reference points that other humans are also aware of, and therefore form the basis of human interconnectedness and human society. I was easily able to write down 1,000 names, and I would have very easily written several thousand if I kept going. The fundamental difference between human society and ape society is that we humans keep track of several thousand people, and apes do not. I wrote down the results of my experiment here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/i-know-more-than-12000-people-so-do-you http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/i-know-more-than-1200... I roughly estimate that I know about 12,000 people.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  I accept that you know of about 12,000 people... Clearly, language is more than just a three-fold improvement on grooming, but Dunbar's number is plausibly relevant to the origin of language.
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    Language took a huge step forward the first time a girl wanted to tell another girl about a boy she met, when the second girl had never met the boy. Many, many concepts had to come into play: a boy you've never met can exist other people can know a person that you don't know events happened at different times in the past other people you don't know can evoke strong emotions in people you do know all of this can be communicated using sounds
- Retric 5y ago
  Dunbar’s number isn’t referring to names it’s referring to relationships. You don’t have a reciprocal relationship with celebrities on TV or fictional characters. So try and create the longest list where you know how everyone on that list feels about everyone else on that list.
wahnfrieden 5y ago
Recent Graeber and Wengrow research has discredited Dunbar's number. It's nonsense, upon which so much more nonsense has been built.
slowhand09 5y ago
I upvoted you for posting a fascinating article. Consider yourself groomed! BTW, this may be one of the more useful posts I've seen recently.
Anon84 5y ago
I worked on verifying Dunbar's number a few years back using social media data from tens of millions of users: https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170 https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170 The main operational idea is that we have a finite capacity for interactions so that if we try to create too many interactions, they'll be shallower than if we focus on just a few important ones.
afpx 5y ago
I've always wanted a social network where I get dropped into a group with 149 random other people (with replacement from attrition). Just to see what happens. I would do it myself, but unfortunately, it seems a lot harder to play with experimental concepts today. Or, at least, maybe I'm overthinking the amount of work that would be required to implement something as simple in functionality.

95 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

I always find it worrying how companies and institutions completely disregard advances in psychological findings. How can anyone in good faith develop a social network after knowing this concrete reality of human connection capacity? How can anyone in good faith defend massive amounts of wealth when phenomena related to hedonic adaptation clearly exist? How can anyone in good faith make their company public after more than 100 years of seeing shareholders take control of the original vision guided by a poor understanding of what a stock's value means (clear example of a metric turned target)? Humans have always been the same, both in their individual and group form, and good leaders from 4000 years ago would fare just as well today if given the right context. Ignoring the history of human behavior means actively disregarding the most powerful tool to understand what stuff works for us and what doesn't. We are forgetting that the vast majority of our activities involves other humans, and 100% of what we do involves ourselves. When creating technology used by groups of people or when making up policies we should be more careful about shaping it from a behavioral point of view rather than a purely technical one. If Facebook was designed from a more human perspective and the like button functioned 38% of the times we would be in a much better state than the like button being formally proven to always work and social interactions working 38% of the time

billfruit 5y ago
Problem may be that there is too much experimental psychology work whose results don't mean anything. To me any argument that is built upon the results of experimental psychology looks rather suspect.
- HidyBush 5y ago
  I am talking about broad foundational results. Of course stuff like "we asked two teams of people to tug on a rope, the first had a prime number of members and had been told their pet dog died last night whereas the other followed a keto diet" don't really matter in the real world. If an analysis on 6 billion phone interactions tells us people don't meaningfully deal with more than 150 other humans then it's something you should actually take into consideration when designing social stuff
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    I dont think there are any broad foundational results, nor do I think there is a social science possible. Social systems are chaotic, and extremely multi-casual, and extremely uncontrollable (in the sense of being able to isolate one cause). Under these conditions there is no scientific method. Anything called a science is just a ritualized imitation. The world does not owe us it being intelligible to us; the success of science in being able to engineer trinkets has fooled us for the past 300 years -- the vast majority of the whole of reality is unknowable -- as in, there is no method which could produce a theory of it (in the strong sense). I think apparently quantitative or "theoretical" results from social sciences are more like curios which could inspire some speculative designs for social institutions. They arent theories (as in science) by which we can engineer institutions. Treating anything in social science as more than some ancient form of zoology, that is, some local observations jotted down by an aristocrat -- is a recipe for disaster. Outside the physics lab, the entire world is an infinite zoo with no grand discernable patterns.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pawelmurias 5y ago
    How do you imagine this bit of research to be be taken into account? I would be shocked if facebook didn't have specific research on how people interact on facebook rather than having to depend on some vague general observation.
genmon 5y ago
(Post author here) Engelbart's team (the one that came up with the personal computer back in 68) was a combination of engineers and psychologists, and I think there's something really powerful about that. It's not about the psychological results specifically, it's more about integrating the psychological perspective during product discovery. So what is the equivalent 50 years on? Maybe sociologists could be hired as PMs, or anthropologists in R&D (I know Microsoft and Intel are really good at this, but I mean for smaller, sub-1000 person firms). I wonder what those blended teams would come up with.
wahnfrieden 5y ago
Advances in findings have indeed been ignored, since Dunbar's number has been discredited yet people continue to recognize it as legitimate. I think it's an incredibly dangerous idea which has convinced a lot of people to run to their chains. See Graeber and Wengrow research cited here https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080 https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080
- taink 5y ago
  The research cited here seems to follow previous conclusions concerning the fact that the largest groups could go up to 2000 individuals. In fact, this is mentioned in page 6 of Dunbar's paper[1] so I fail to see how that invalidates anything about this theory. Perhaps have I missed something? [1]: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf#page=6 https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199...
  - wahnfrieden 5y ago
    Thank you for discussing the actual research (on one side at least). My understanding is that Graeber and Wengrow are saying that the "band" grouping is inaccurate nonsense, that "band" relations can extend to several thousand people without "tribal society" necessarily emerging >The “Personal Social Group” = 150 people (bands of common lineage — what Dunbar believed to be the biggest group of people one person can have close relationships with). The “Clan” = 450-500 people (cohesive sub tribal unit). The “Tribal Group” = 1500 — 2000 people (tribe). Many people use Dunbar's number to justify why larger societies of humans must necessarily require bureaucracy, coercion under threat of violence, etc. to scale beyond a couple hundred people and that any alternative to the power structures we have today is unrealistic fantasy. It's one key to capitalist realism
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
"Humans have always been the same" It may be true that modern life (be it Industrial age or Information age for your demarcation) is evolutionarily short, remember that the rules of environmentally-triggered gene expression can effectively result in "evolved behavior" faster than actual mutation gathering. If gene expression is adaptable to social conditions, and social conditions produce the same pattern of gene expression across generations, then the functional organisms: shape, weight, aggressiveness, psychology produced by the pattern of gene expression WILL change on a large scale. So you could do psychological/anthropological behavioral studies for "modern" humans in "modern" life, if they aren't doing cross-cultural comparisons, and "universal psychological truths" won't be universal. The big question to me personally is if you have sustained centuries of, let's say, "capitalism-based selection", how much drift is there? Capitalism undeniably rewards certain sociopathic traits that really are only applicable to modern times: plenty of resources, availability of technology, etc. We're probably at the tail end of a long run of "plenty".

AndrewOMartin 5y ago

Silly headline. > Dunbar’s number, 150, is the natural size of human social groups. Presumably human language gives us a 2.8x boost over other primates.

isitmadeofglass 5y ago
There is nothing silly about the headline. It’s a perfect tie in to the text of the article.
- AndrewOMartin 5y ago
  It might have just caught me in a sour mood.

deepsun 5y ago

> Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men False. There are a lot of units, one can certainly pick some of them of about 150 size. But there's no reason to call it "basic". Smallest unit is 1 person. Smallest group you can find is 2 person (e.g. operators of an ATGM).

Sharlin 5y ago
Yes, in modern warfare. But it used to be somewhat more true in the time before modern firearms, when battles were fought in close order formations. Even now, a company in many militaries seems like the smallest unit that's somehow "self-contained" or capable of independent operation and logistics in a way neither a platoon or a battalion does. It's probably also not entirely a coincidence that a lot of military fiction seems to focus on a company or a company-sized unit.
- juki 5y ago
  > Even now, a company in many militaries seems like the smallest unit that's somehow "self-contained" or capable of independent operation and logistics in a way neither a platoon or a battalion does. Do you have company and battalion mixed up here? Why wouldn't a battalion, which consists of companies, be capable of independent operation if the individual companies are?
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    My wording was clumsy, what I meant is that a company, rather than a battalion, is the smallest somewhat independent unit, in some way more "basic" than the latter.
- deepsun 5y ago
  Fuller quote: > Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men: This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104 BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century. And I'm actively against the statement that number 150 is relevant because of all-to-all communication pattern. In army (as well as emergency responders like firefighters) all-to-all communication is actively forbidden, and only possible for groups of 3-6 people of similar ranks/positions. All other communications must go either up or down the authority chain.

dalbasal 5y ago

So... I think Dunbar's number exemplifies a failing in our social science culture, or maybe our epistemological tendencies. .. or maybe it just shows what happens when MBA texbooks adopt something. We don't really know what to do with a piece of insight or knowledge like Dunbar's number. When is it "true?" When is it relevant? What does it say about how we should organize? What does it say about how organisations of different sizes function? What kind of successes or failures does Dunbar's nunber suggest we encounter. I'm not saying that Dunbar's number is wrong. I'm suggesting that for it to be profound in a scientific sense, it needs to have consequences. Prediction, prescription, insight about existing structures, something. We intuitively agree that working at an 80 person company is different from an 800 person could company. I don't see Dunbar's theories adding much beyond that, no predictions or insights about how such organisations work. Mostly it's a piece of theory that can be thrown onto slides, in support or objection to something as needed. Is there a there, there? Do I have this wrong?

bjelkeman-again 5y ago
My experience from the army, a startup growing to 100 or so (majority remote, or local offices), hanging out in online communities which grow beyond 120, is that around 100-130 it gets hard to keep track of all the people and have some emotional relationship. Without that relationship it gets harder for me to care about the progress the group makes as a unit. Interestingly enough, for me it is based on context. It is ok to have 100 people in the company, 100 people in an online community and 100 people in an off line community, all at the same time, and still keep track and have some kind of relationship. When a context grows too large it doesn’t seem to affect the other contexts.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  I agree that there are elements like this that make intuitive sense. What I am saying is: After at these years on military/boardroom slides... what does Dunbar's tell us? How has it influenced how we do anything? What should or shouldn't be organized in smaller/larger groups? How? It just feels like a lot of popular social science tidbits give us a great introduction with no follow through. What was the point of all those slides?

0des 5y ago

Titles are getting really weird and out of hand these days.

snvzz 5y ago

What an extremely annoying oscillating background color. Had to screw with the page to disable it.

lkrubner 5y ago

While Dunbar's number is useful, keep in mind that the average person is aware of several thousand other people, and it is that larger number that really makes human society different from ape society. As a test, I once spent a day writing down every person I knew. I included real people, such as friends of mine, and celebrities, such as Beyonce and John Lennon, and also fictional characters such as God, Moses, Gandalf, Sauron and King Arthur -- these are all people who function as reference points that other humans are also aware of, and therefore form the basis of human interconnectedness and human society. I was easily able to write down 1,000 names, and I would have very easily written several thousand if I kept going. The fundamental difference between human society and ape society is that we humans keep track of several thousand people, and apes do not. I wrote down the results of my experiment here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/i-know-more-than-12000-people-so-do-you http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/i-know-more-than-1200... I roughly estimate that I know about 12,000 people.

mannykannot 5y ago
I accept that you know of about 12,000 people... Clearly, language is more than just a three-fold improvement on grooming, but Dunbar's number is plausibly relevant to the origin of language.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  Language took a huge step forward the first time a girl wanted to tell another girl about a boy she met, when the second girl had never met the boy. Many, many concepts had to come into play: a boy you've never met can exist other people can know a person that you don't know events happened at different times in the past other people you don't know can evoke strong emotions in people you do know all of this can be communicated using sounds
Retric 5y ago
Dunbar’s number isn’t referring to names it’s referring to relationships. You don’t have a reciprocal relationship with celebrities on TV or fictional characters. So try and create the longest list where you know how everyone on that list feels about everyone else on that list.

wahnfrieden 5y ago

Recent Graeber and Wengrow research has discredited Dunbar's number. It's nonsense, upon which so much more nonsense has been built.

slowhand09 5y ago

I upvoted you for posting a fascinating article. Consider yourself groomed! BTW, this may be one of the more useful posts I've seen recently.

Anon84 5y ago

I worked on verifying Dunbar's number a few years back using social media data from tens of millions of users: https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170 https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170 The main operational idea is that we have a finite capacity for interactions so that if we try to create too many interactions, they'll be shallower than if we focus on just a few important ones.

afpx 5y ago

I've always wanted a social network where I get dropped into a group with 149 random other people (with replacement from attrition). Just to see what happens. I would do it myself, but unfortunately, it seems a lot harder to play with experimental concepts today. Or, at least, maybe I'm overthinking the amount of work that would be required to implement something as simple in functionality.