5 ms·

Dunbar's Number isn't just a number, it's the law

16 points by bdfh42 17y ago

Tichy 17y ago
Maybe, but then again, perhaps with better tools it is possible to have more friends after all. Some people make good money by being able to connect to more people than the average person, and then facilitate contacts between less gifted connectors.
- qeorge 17y ago
  If I understand it correctly, you can "have" more friends, as in you are aware of them, but we have a capacity of how many people we can truly care about at any given time. I don't know about 150, but this rings true for me. As I've aged, I've drifted in and out of friends' lives. Its not that I don't like them anymore, its just that I can only keep up with so many people at once.
- a-priori 17y ago
  One difference between non-human primates and humans is that humans have a wide variation in the closeness of relationships, from celebrities you have never met but hear about occasionally on the news, to a soul-mate you know everything about. Presumably, the more intimate the relationship, the more cortical real-estate is taken up with information about that person. Non-human primates have their troop; certainly there's variation in relationships within that troop, but it's still just one troop of finite size. So, what this means in the context of humans is that Dunbar's number is very much dependent on the closeness of the relationships you're dealing with. Co-workers are different from close friends are different from comrades-in-arms. Someone who's up on pop culture (i.e, not me) may be able to tell you something about a couple hundred actors, athletes, politicians and so on, in addition to their personal acquaintances. Are those people included in their "Dunbar group"? If not, then where do you draw the line? It really is a problem of defining what, exactly, Dunbar's number means for humans.
daeken 17y ago
The discussion of Dunbar's Number (as well as WL Gore, for that matter) in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is very interesting. I highly recommend the book for everyone here.
StrawberryFrog 17y ago
"The law" eh? Wikipedia calls it just a theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number I doubt that it's even a theory which has solid weight of evidence showing that it applies to human beings.
gaius 17y ago
This is misguided, as Facebook "friends" aren't your friends so much as they are your address book/contact list. FB doesn't differentiate between someone you know through work, someone you went to school with and someone you see socially. If I added up everyone who I ever might want to contact about anything ever, I'd probably have more than a thousand contacts. I don't hang out with any more than a few dozen people regularly tho'.
JoeAltmaier 17y ago
First we must define "friend". Its not "someone who's name I remember".

16 points by bdfh42 17y ago

Tichy 17y ago

Maybe, but then again, perhaps with better tools it is possible to have more friends after all. Some people make good money by being able to connect to more people than the average person, and then facilitate contacts between less gifted connectors.

qeorge 17y ago
If I understand it correctly, you can "have" more friends, as in you are aware of them, but we have a capacity of how many people we can truly care about at any given time. I don't know about 150, but this rings true for me. As I've aged, I've drifted in and out of friends' lives. Its not that I don't like them anymore, its just that I can only keep up with so many people at once.
a-priori 17y ago
One difference between non-human primates and humans is that humans have a wide variation in the closeness of relationships, from celebrities you have never met but hear about occasionally on the news, to a soul-mate you know everything about. Presumably, the more intimate the relationship, the more cortical real-estate is taken up with information about that person. Non-human primates have their troop; certainly there's variation in relationships within that troop, but it's still just one troop of finite size. So, what this means in the context of humans is that Dunbar's number is very much dependent on the closeness of the relationships you're dealing with. Co-workers are different from close friends are different from comrades-in-arms. Someone who's up on pop culture (i.e, not me) may be able to tell you something about a couple hundred actors, athletes, politicians and so on, in addition to their personal acquaintances. Are those people included in their "Dunbar group"? If not, then where do you draw the line? It really is a problem of defining what, exactly, Dunbar's number means for humans.

daeken 17y ago

The discussion of Dunbar's Number (as well as WL Gore, for that matter) in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is very interesting. I highly recommend the book for everyone here.

StrawberryFrog 17y ago

"The law" eh? Wikipedia calls it just a theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number I doubt that it's even a theory which has solid weight of evidence showing that it applies to human beings.

gaius 17y ago

This is misguided, as Facebook "friends" aren't your friends so much as they are your address book/contact list. FB doesn't differentiate between someone you know through work, someone you went to school with and someone you see socially. If I added up everyone who I ever might want to contact about anything ever, I'd probably have more than a thousand contacts. I don't hang out with any more than a few dozen people regularly tho'.

JoeAltmaier 17y ago

First we must define "friend". Its not "someone who's name I remember".