Dunbar’s number

Straight from Wikipedia, the lazy person’s encyclopedia, the following is the definition of Dunbar’s number:

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

 

A more easy to understand definition that I like is that Dunbar’s number is the number of people we would feel comfortable to bump into in a bar and sit down and have a drink with. Now Dunbar’s research was based on anthropological observations of animals with various analysis done by comparing brain size. It has its own critics of methodology, but has managed to be accepted into mainstream discussion on relationships. Dunbar’s number is 150 for humans. We are capable of maintaining around 150 close relationships of this kind.

This really got me thinking why I have over 1000 contacts in my phone? Many of whom I have not spoken to in over a year. Many of these whom I have never phoned. What is the motive for us to be continually collecting contacts, likes and “friends”? Do we feel that we are more relevant to the world because of the sheer number of people we know? Is it more about the calibre or social status of these people than the number of people? So as an example, if I had the President’s personal phone number, would I actually call him? Probably not I think!

More questions too in terms of who would make it onto your list of 150 people? Would it be the people you interact with most often? Would most of the list consist with work colleagues because this is where you spend most of your time? Has your list remained static for a long time or is it constantly changing? Who thinks they are on your Dunbar list, but is actually not? Would extroverts have longer lists than introverts? So many questions!

To process this concept even more I thought again of shorter lists. If you were to have a “half Dunbar” or “quarter Dunbar” list who would make it onto that list? If you had to be radical and identify your top 10 relationship list, who would be on that list? Would it be obligatory due to expectations such as family or would you even exclude some family in favour of friends? If you had a regular trip to certain city where you know a lot of people (as I do), who would you actually make the effort to spend time with and why? Is there an anti Dunbar list which basically is a list of people you are least compatible with? Included in this is there a list of people that you hope you will never see again? If you were to pass away, who do you think would attend your funeral? Would this list change if there was a financial cost of attending the funeral? Who would be at your graveside regardless of cost?

Well I’m sure your get the point now. Today’s post is not about Dunbar’s list, but really about relationships. In a world where it is acceptable to phase in and phase out many human interactions, maybe the genius of Dunbar’s number really is to force us to think about the quality and quantity of our everyday human relationships.