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Robin Dunbar: We can only ever have 150 friends at most… |

Not many people have a number named after them, but Robin Dunbar lays claim to the Dunbar Number. Confusingly, no precise value has been attached to this figure, but a commonly cited approximation is 150 – and this is the number of people with whom we can maintain a meaningful relationship, whether in a hunter-gatherer society or on Facebook. The director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University is also the author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Faber). It's no surprise he's an engaging companion.

(via Robin Dunbar: We can only ever have 150 friends at most… | Science | The Guardian)

#dunbars number #robin dunbar #sociology #psychology

I am reading "this book is full of spiders" Right now and this part of the book has really made me THINK.

Dunbar's number theory.

based on the size of a humans neo-cortex that number is about 150. thats how many other humans we can recognize before we max out our connections with some variability between individuals of course. That is our maximum capacity for sympathy.

everything we do requires cooperation in groups larger than 150. Governments, corporations, society as a whole, and we are physically incapable of handling it. So every moment of the day we urgently try to separate everyone on earth into two groups. Those inside the sphere of sympathy, and those outside.

black vs white. Liberal vs Conservative. Muslim vs Christian, lakers fan vs celtics fan. With us, or against us. Infected vs clean. we simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots and here is the key. Those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such.

This is why you feel worse about your girlfriend cutting her finger than you do about an earthquake in Afghanistan that kills 100,000 people. This, is what makes genocide possible. This is what makes it possible for a CEO to sign off on a policy that will poison a river in Malaysia and create 10,000 deformed infants.

because of this limitation in the mental hardware those Malaysians may as well be ants.

#✎ 𝐎𝐎𝐂. // welcome to my trash kingdom.#This is so #idek I had to save this here #dunbars number

Circuit Tracks Dunbars Number

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Dunbar's number

is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2] This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.[4] Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".[5]

(via Dunbar's number - Wikipedia)

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