Dunbar's number is a perennial pop psychology headline (You Can Only Have 150 Friends!?!
), but in my experience, most people view it to be a pretty plausible theory for social relationspic.twitter.com/3f4wgkO0xC
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poast structuralist, meesa rationalist, emotional hypercapitalist, ardent anti-insight crusader 
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Dunbar's number is a perennial pop psychology headline (You Can Only Have 150 Friends!?!
), but in my experience, most people view it to be a pretty plausible theory for social relationspic.twitter.com/3f4wgkO0xC
This phenomenon is an emergent property—or an intentional organizational principle—of many kinds of social coordination systems (e.g. villages, academia, military, corporations)pic.twitter.com/J2D6Mzs5Fa
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
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
According to Dunbar, most people spend the majority of their social time and energy inside their first three layerspic.twitter.com/ynBRazUzZs
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
"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
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
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?
freq. doesn't map well with closeness for me, does it for you?
Nope, I‘m pretty sure I maintain much more frequent interaction with a larger number of people I suspect this is also because I don’t currently have a primary partner or any dependents Right now I probably have more time for 3-4th level friendships than I might in the future
same, makes sense. I also communicate infrequently with my closest friends. Kinda always have if we weren't geographically proximate.
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