Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends According to "Dunbar's Number," human beings can maintain a network of only about 150 close friends. istockphoto.com hide caption itoggle caption istockphoto.com According to "Dunbar's Number," human beings can maintain a network of only about 150 close friends. istockphoto.com GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. "When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin. From its modest beginnings, GORE-TEX grew and grew, Dunbar says, until Gore opened up a large factory. Then one day, Dunbar says, Gore walked into his factory. "And he simply didn't know who everybody was." Gore wondered why this was. Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. Business was never better.
Cameron Marlow | cameronmarlow.com Dunbar's number rules the Twitterverse › News in Science (ABC Science) News in Science Tuesday, 7 June 2011 Genelle WeuleABC Social networks Ashton Kutcher might have more than six million followers on Twitter, but his brain's not big enough to have deep conversations with more than 150 of his nearest and dearest. Even the most ardent Twitter fiends can only befriend a finite number of people, according to new research published on the pre-press website arXiv.org. This finding backs up a theory known as Dunbar's number, which suggests that the size of the neocortex in the human brain limits our ability to maintain close relationships with more than around 150 people. Proposed in the 1990s, Dunbar's number has been applied to social connections from Neolithic and Roman times to Facebook. Researchers led by Dr Bruno Goncalves from the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University in the United States wanted to see if this was also true for Twitter. When people first join Twitter they have few friends. Is Dunbar's number real?
Preferential behavior in online groups | cameronmarlow.com Publication Type: Conference Paper Source: WSDM '08: Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining, ACM, New York, NY, USA, p.117–128 (2008) Keywords: groups, incentives Abstract: Online communities in the form of message boards, listservs, and newsgroups continue to represent a considerable amount of the social activity on the Internet. What's Your Dunbar Number? There are several key indicators - numbers we take seriously - to indicate "how we're doing." Cholesterol levels, salary, and IQ score, for example. And now the concept of a "Dunbar number" is being tossed around. Briefly, the term is used to suggest that we can only manage, cognitively, a limited number of relationships. The average, suggested in anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research, is just under 150. That's the average, so there are folks who could handle more than that, or fewer than that. In a blog about executive functioning and time management , who cares about Dunbar's number? In "Theory of Mind," intentionality refers to our ability to understand the intentions of other people. If you're a committed vegan but can see how other people might ethically arrive at a meat-based diet , that flexibility takes cognitive activity that we believe takes place in certain regions of the prefrontal cortex. photos: best friends and social wordle
Validation of Dunbar's Number in Twitter Conversations The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes - Life With Alacrity For those of you not familiar with Dunbar's number it basically says that the most amount of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with is 150. According to 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.Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.” There have been several folks such as Chris Brogan who have talked about “beating Dunbar's number,” but there is no need to do so and in fact I believe the whole discussion around this number as it related to social media and online networks is a bit irrelevant. Your thoughts? Link to original post
Facebook, Dunbar’s Number and current killer apps British anthropologist Robin Dunbar conducted research in the 1990s on the optimum social network size for primates. It turns out that there is a correlation with neocortex volume – the bigger the brain, the bigger the possible social network. This stands to reason, since being able to recognise faces and to know the pecking order for everyone in the group takes brain power. For humans, Dunbar’s Number is approximately 150. This means that to be able to know each member in a community and to know where they fit in that community, we are limited to about 150 as the community size. Read more in The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes (which has some interesting info on the size of online mutliplayer game groups) and Wikipedia’s article, Dunbar’s Number. Now to Facebook (and MySpace, Flickr, countless blogs, wikis, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc). Also, viral marketing is an extraordinary phenomenon. And what’s it all got to do with education? There are lessons in all of this…
Beating Dunbars Number There’s a theory called Dunbar’s Number that suggests there’s an upper limit to the amount of relationships we can maintain. If you’re interested in networking, this should be an issue. That number, for the record, is 150. Derek Halpern asked me how I dealt with that issue, as I spend my time with far more than 150. Here are some thoughts. Be One of the 150 First, an idea from my book with Julien Smith. You could do this geographically, if that makes sense. Or you might do it by vertical. Finding the right groups of 150 to connect with is helpful. Be at the Elbow of Every Deal One way to beat Dunbar’s number is to make it work in reverse. In either case, you’re in the network. Speaking of memory, why would you ever require your memory to stay inside your head? Database, Database, Database You are not required to remember every single person you’ve ever met in your head. I’m using BatchBook for my database, because it’s just really simple, and yet powerful. Keep a Pulse In Between Contacts