Dunbar’s Number and Limited Social Caring

Thirty or so years ago, when asked how many friends someone has, they might think carefully and report their closest friends — people they see often, talk to often, and do things often with. Today, in the age of social media, “friend” can be a term loaded with different meaning, and it’s significantly easier to stay in casual contact with a multitude of people. Is someone who you’ve known since high school and never removed from Facebook still a “friend,” even if you talk to each other sometimes? A British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar studied a phenomenon that might clarify this. Essentially, Dunbar proposed that the human brain only has so much cognitive capacity to care for a set number of people, and he linked this to a correlation between other primates’ brain sizes and the size of their social groups. The number he settled on for humans was 150, but this was in the 1990s, and, of course, the social landscape has changed dramatically since then. He revisited his findings decades later and found that even with the advent of social media, humans tend to only have the capacity to form meaningful relationships with about 150 people, no matter if they had even over a thousand casual contacts on social media (Dunbar, 2016).

So, what does this mean? It might seem a little obvious for people that are disconnected mentally from social media. Of course there’s a difference between a Facebook friend and a real friend. But Dunbar’s number previously didn’t have to contend with mass contact with so many people outside their 150 close relationships, and not usually in such socially intimate settings. We’ve read plenty about the proximity effect in our text — that physical closeness breeds familiarity, and familiarity often breeds personal like, and that “psychological nearness” can also qualify for generating proximity effects in people (Schneider, Gruman & Coutts, 2012). With social media, now we are in proximity of up to thousands of people at a given time depending on how tightly we control our online accounts and interactions. That’s an unfathomable number for the primate brains Dunbar studied. However, Dunbar’s findings essentially state that the proximity effect doesn’t carry over through the internet — at least not in the sense of it changing the quantity of our social groups. No matter how many people we can now be easily close to through social media or long-distance communication, our brains are hard-wired to only care for so many people (Dunbar, 2016).

I feel that Dunbar’s number is important to keep in mind with online interactions. At times, it can feel that we’re forced into close proximity with people we don’t like due to the social expectations of online media and communication. It’s rude to not have your relatives added on Facebook, and rejecting coworkers’ presence on social media feeds can come across as having something to hide. When forced into contact with these people, it can breed resentment — after all, they’re outside our Dunbar’s number, yet they’re in an almost inescapable space that was more “designed” to be for close friends and family, and we have to remain in constant contact with them. Schneider et al. (2012) stated that the proximity effect can generate dislike as well from getting along poorly, but online, it’s not always as easy as just avoiding the other person if there is social media overlap and social pressure to not “unfriend” the disliked person. As time goes on and as social communication becomes easier, we should accept that on some level, aspects of our brains are much more difficult, if not impossible, to change. 150 close relationships are more than enough for any given person’s everyday life. But social media may make us think that 150 is an inadequate number and cause us to chase relationships that, ultimately, will never be as personally close and could even breed contempt in the wrong circumstances.

References

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2016). Do social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks? Royal Society Open Science. Retrieved from http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/1/150292

Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., and Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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