Beating Dunbars Number

I’ve thought about this a great deal, as I think Dunbar’s Number/Dunbar Corollary do present implications for social media. My conclusion is that Dunbar’s number doesn’t apply to social media, because these aren’t relationships, they are “acquaintancships.” The relationship limit covered by Dunbar’s Number is closer to what you describe at the end of your post: real, flesh-and-blood these people matter to me-relationships.

Politicians have for years pushed well beyond the upper limits of Dunbar’s Number, as far as contacts/established personal acquaintances. I’ve seen it, I worked in politics. Some of these men and women can remember families back generations, people they’ve met at fundraisers, donors, constituents, lobbyists–I have a good memory, but some of these people amazed me. But they weren’t relationships in a sociological setting like Dunbar postulated. Like so much in social media that gets mentioned, turned around, and examined, there’s nothing really *that* new here. It’s just that people who aren’t accustomed to thinking in these terms are now confronted with it.

Net, I don’t think expanding social circles is about beating Dunbar’s number. Now, if one has the depth of knowledge and understanding about the personal goals, family life, deep exchanges with 300 or more people, we can talk about beating Dunbar’s number, IMHO.

Jen

Thanks for this article. Thinking of my relationships as subsets makes since, especially in Twitter, since I have so many interests and people to keep track of in all of them. I’ve bookmarked this to be able to take a more in depth look and do some thinking on it later.

Thanks Chris for your mention of BatchBook! You’ve definitely hung a few extra zeros on Dunbar’s number – glad we can help you better manage it.

Just wanted to let folks know that we have a special promo code for Chris’ readers. He thinks you’re all rockstars and so do we, hence the code “rockstar“. This will give you an extra free month from any paid account (for a total of two free months). Give it a whirl, drop us a line. And if anyone out there is working on a cloning device, please let Mr. Brogan know asap.

Chris,

I am able to cultivate many more relationships by commenting on blogs, following Twitter contacts and spending time just simply caring more about others than myself.

If I can help you in any way, this gives my life purpose. If we collaborate on a business deal that makes us both money, great! But it should not be the underlying factors building the relationship. If you are genuine, authentic and helpful, people see this constant in you and respond accordingly.

It is truly amazing how late in life I discovered these keys!

Respectfully,

Nicholas Chase
http://www.twitter.com/nachase

We have a short-term memory limit. It determines how many concepts we can deal with at once. It determines our risk tolerance. The space between the short-term memory limit and Dunbar’s Number is an opportunity for systems augmentation.

My experience has been that the most important financial relationships happen to be loose connections. The most important emotional relationships are my close connections. It’s important to feed both.

In my experience Dunbar’s Number has to do with the quality vs the quantity side of the equation. You can have far more people “databased” and socially connected that you can be in touch with… but 150 near-friends and 15 deep-friends is about what I can manage.

Excellent post, Chris. Whether one agrees with the Dunbar number or not, the reality is that relationships need to be managed. BatchBook sounds like a great tool. I’m going to check it out right away. I need something as I grow my online relationship base. This sounds like a good tool for that purpose. Thanks for the post, Chris. I found it very valuable.

Suggestion about “how can I remind each person of my network and find the appropriate one when I need it,quick” . Chris has a good method but he had to add tags and sometimes you miss to put the right tag or no time to find the good one.
What about a tool with a non-structured database and a search engine which searchs all over one single word you enter in the data base? This is what I use: I do not bother with tags, I enter each person with all his story in one article of my private wiki (mediawiki). Then if I look for the women who cooks the best “spagetti alla carbonara”, I enter “carbonara” in the search box. Et voila!
Hope this will help.

Dunbar’s original number, 148.3 or something, was an extrapolation of human group size based on the group sizes of other primates that were maintained by grooming, related to their brain sizes. It is a predicted number of group size that we can maintain by grooming, under survival conditions, given the size of our neo-cortex.
Dunbar himself postulated that language was the way humans overcome that number. We don’t groom a whole lot anymore after all (usually nuclear family excepted). And most of us here do not live under survival conditions. So treating this number as an upper limit to what number of relationships we can maintain is rubbish. It’s not what the theory was about in the first place. If it was an upper limit we could not have grown beyond nomadic hunter gatherer groups and have formed more complex societies.

There are group sizes that feel more comfortable to us, which may very well have to do with Dunbar’s predicted number. Personally e.g. I feel I can ‘slip’ into a context complete with its relations between others, and then move on to the next context of say 150 people. The same with teams (around 5), basic groups (around 12), larger groups (around 25). Feeling comfortable in certain group sizes is not the same as having upper limits.

Chris I think the major point you make is that social networks allow us to connect with 1000s of people, and if that’s your game you need to organize your contacts in ways that are useful to you, so you can find them again based on your needs and theirs. I have done this since 1992 using ACT! which I still use. I include classifications like how and where I met them, such as an association, a luncheon, their industry etc. I also take notes about things that we talk about or a few words about their life, job changes periodially which is really handy since I am dummer than Dunbar’s number so I needed to resort to organizing my contacts way before 150!

The beauty of social networks and blogging is that you can connect with people you would never have before. So I like to take advantage of those many loose connections by organizing them, since I enjoy connecting people with each other too. It isn’t just about me.

I don’t think Dunbars # applies in todays age of databases :)

From Wikipedia:
“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.”

In the age of social networking online (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc…) we CAN far exceed Dunbars #, but my understanding of this # is that it is meant to apply to relationships in the ‘real’ world (meaning met in person) and was thought of before the online social networking/database driven ‘relationships’ existed.

We need a new Dunbars # that accounts for online database driven relationships.

—
http://twitter.com/franswaa

I think you provide some valuable suggestions on how to maximize the number of people we can have relationships with, and how to maximize productivity along those lines. I still think Dunbar’s number is essentially valid, however – I would say the key is understanding that the 150 refers to truly “meaningful” relationships, and I suppose the definition of”meaningful” might vary from person to person, depending on their interpersonal skills, memory and of course, value system.

Hi Chris,

Thank you for writing this post. When you said “you need to database your contacts” in our quick chat, it hit me in the stomach. How could I have overlooked such an easy solution? So, I was looking for a way to do this and I settled with excel. However, the key take away from Chris’s post is that you need a system — excel or batchbook both work.

Now since I’ve been doing this for a week, I can’t talk about how it changed my life. However, I do see the opportunity on the horizon and I will be sure to write about it at some point or another. Thank you again Chris.

Thanks for adding the addendum. I’m trying to figure out this distinction, so that my close friends and family members neither feel like part of the 150 nor strive to be part of the 150. Not sure if that made any sense, but the fact that you compartmentalize/discriminate the two makes me feel better. Can you say more about the addendum and the way you separate your personal life from your business life? Thx!

I came across Dunbar’s book – Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language about 5 years ago. Browsing through it in a bookshop, I realised it might offer an explanation for something I had observed in men’s peer support groups for years, and after reading it, I am convinced it does. I was looking for some explanation for the deeply calming effect generated by certain types of inter-male interactions in men’s groups.

In addition to basic hygiene benefits, grooming amongst our primate ancestors acted as social glue through its endorphin-generating effect resulting from the trusted physical touch of another. Grooming is a peaceful activity that passes in silence. It effectives provides a natural mini ‘high’.

I then suspected and am now convinced that only certain types of speech-based connections between humans generate an effect similar to that which grooming produces among primates.

And that is an intimate conversation, ones not restricted to sexual intimacy. Dunbar makes the point that in our most valued relationships we dispense with talk and revert to hugs, embraces and affectionate touch. When two people engage in an attentive, one-person-speaking-at-a-time, with frequent long pauses before a response type interactions, then the ‘grooming effect’ is most likely to occur.

I would suggest that an appreciation of that dynamic is essential to engaging with the question of whether Dunbar’s 150 number can be exceeded and how technology might assist or impede that process.

This article reminds me of the efficient method I use to minimize the time I require to find my kind of entertainment on the net: I have a “portfolio” of approximately 10 bloggers whose blogs I skim once a week. These bloggers are “connectors” or “thinkers”– they have links to the most popular videos, articles, video games, quizzes and photos going around the net. The initial time investment to find each such blogger might be an hour or two, but it is well worth it in the long run. I look for a blogger who posts at least once a week, has posted in the past week, and has an interesting backstory (I read his or her entire archives). I don’t have to go looking at all the different popular video sites (YouTube, Snotr, Shoutfile, Hilu, etc., etc.) and all the different newspapers, magazines ezines, etc., and go Googling all the different video game sites and quiz sites and photo/joke sites on the net. I simply skim my bloggers. :)