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
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poast structuralist, meesa rationalist, emotional hypercapitalist, ardent anti-insight crusader 
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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?
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...
which examples of exceptional cases come to mind for you?
i’m pretty convinced that college enables a lot of people to have circles greater than 5, 15, 50, 150 etc since it organically enables people to spend an outsize amount of time cultivating their relationships
also i think those bulls-eye figures are just averages, and there’s a good bit of variation in circle-size equilibria between different individuals (i think we often call this introversion and extroversion)
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