R.I.M. Dunbar
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What most people don't know is that Dunbar's number describes only one of the concentric circles of relations surrounding an individual They scale by roughly a factor of 3, and "frequency of contact, emotional closeness, and altruism all decline across successive circles"pic.twitter.com/WqkibcWHKg
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There a lot of ways to define and circumscribe each layer of relationships, but Dunbar roughly describes them as: - primary partner (1.5) - intimate friends (5) - best friends (15) - good friends (50) - 'just' friends (150) - acquaintances (500) - names/faces (1500)pic.twitter.com/AXTv5yo7R6
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According to Dunbar, most people spend the majority of their social time and energy inside their first three layerspic.twitter.com/ynBRazUzZs
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This has a lot to do with time scarcity and frequency requirements Most of us contact our primary partners daily, but Dunbar proposes that you need to interact with a friend at least weekly to qualify for the 5-layer, monthly for the 15-layer, and annually for the 150-layerpic.twitter.com/eYIuMvSZBo
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"If someone is contacted less often than the defining rate for more than a few months, emotional closeness will inexorably decline to a level appropriate for the new contact rate" This is why moving, graduate college, etc. suck so much—your entire graph recedes outward
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Romantic relationships also tend to crowd out other Dunbar slots, if only temporarily. Ever had a friend fall in love, then drop off the face of the earth?pic.twitter.com/j8tAD3TkqA
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It's an interesting exercise to try mapping your own social graph onto Dunbar's bullseye configuration—do the circles seem accurate to you? What about interaction frequency v. closeness? How often do you contact your 5-layer friends? 15-layer? 150-layer?
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And what about exceptional cases? Do you know someone who might be an outlier here? Someone whose circles are noticeably tighter/broader than the numbers laid out on Dunbar's bullseye? How do these people's habits deviate from the norm? Several examples come to mind...
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Dunbar has done similar research with other apes, including chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, among others Interestingly, Dunbar's number for chimpanzees is around 50—a group size at which most observed chimpanzee tribes begin to fracturepic.twitter.com/262dHL5n9x
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Apes maintain group cohesion through 'social grooming', where they pick bugs and debris out of their companions' fur Across species, more grooming enables stronger relationships and larger group sizes The most social non-human apes spend about 20% of their time groomingpic.twitter.com/KPIIzoRwSa
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Humans don't do nearly as much grooming as other apes, and even if we did, we couldn't possibly afford to do it enough to build groups of 150+ individualspic.twitter.com/xenLY6PdbZ
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Enter language: "Not only can speech be combined with almost every other activity, but it can also be used to address several different individuals simultaneously." Compared to physical grooming, language is *insanely* scalable and efficient as a vector for social bondingpic.twitter.com/E26CgvApzN
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In addition to gossip/storytelling, humans also facilitate group cohesion through several other unique verbal and sub-verbal activities, including writing, singing, dancing, and laughter Altogether, Dunbar estimates that our tools are 2-3x more effective than social groomingpic.twitter.com/1FhptCCZUZ
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I think language v. grooming is the thing that distinguishes us most from other apes—and the thing that makes it easiest to understand our primate ancestryhttps://twitter.com/choosy_mom/status/1222251506331553793?s=20 …
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While it's impressive to understand how effective we are at creating large social graphs, it's important to remember that human communities are a means to an end: longevity, health, and well-beingpic.twitter.com/6GJSUJIlaz
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The volume/quality of your social relationships is predictive of a wide range of physiological and mental health outcomes—isolation is a sickness in the literal sensehttps://twitter.com/choosy_mom/status/1221616773159505920?s=20 …
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A lot more to talk about here, but I'll end the thread with this very real graph from Dunbar's 'Anatomy of Friendship' (2017), my favorite academic paper of all time
@scienceshitpostpic.twitter.com/PmZIwbdtlK
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End of conversation
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), but in my experience, most people view it to be a pretty plausible theory for social relations