R.I.M. Dunbar
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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