I think each individual is capable of maintaining membership of up to 15 groups in which they know closely 10 individuals. The total – Dunbar’s number – doesn’t change. If I count up all the groups – including forums, real life and family – I can call myself ‘closely associated with’ it doesn’t exceed 15. The total size of the groups with which I am a member may number 1,000s but that’s not a reflection of my social activity as I’m only close friends with a subset of each group.

The carpet is only so big, you may think you have broken Dunbar’s number but on analysis of your behaviour and attention you actually give to different groups that cannot be the case, when you move the carpet there’s a gap at the other end of the room.

I think the observation that technology enables individuals to become members of multiple separate groups in which they know a dozen people rather than a single group in which they know 150 is a really profound one which must have interesting social consequences.

Can technology influence the Dunbar number? Or is 150 friends still all one can really handle? …

But as Sandgroper also notes, this ‘science’ is, well… I’d like to know how one could in theory disprove the theory that this number, the ‘cognitive limitation’, is even relevant; rather than time constraints, economic constraints, preferences, ect.. It seems that if people have more social relationsships than the theory predicts is possible, the weasel words take care of that problem, because those marginal social relationsships aren’t ‘genuine’ or whatever.

Is it necessary for a “stable social relationship” that I know how each person I have such a relationship with relates to each other person with whom I have such a relationship?

I have friends whose interactions with some other friends is unknown to me. The same has been true at various jobs I’ve had.

Wasn’t the whole idea about Dunbar’s Number that this number is limited because of our cortical size? That we can only manage ~150 because that’s how many relationships our brain can juggle, not how many we have time to write letters to.

Yeah, sometimes I wish I was a meerkat. Or at least that all of my family lived or could stay in one continent, the ones I care about at least.

I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter, and would rather walk miles to talk to someone face to face than call them on the phone. This is eccentric of me and is going to have to change real soon.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go back to watching the progressing rescue of 33 Chilean miners who have become very dear friends of mine (no they haven’t), plus of course the 4 rescue crew who have been lowered down the hole. What I want to know is how the last guy out is going to fasten the door on the Fenix 2 capsule so that they can winch him to the surface, given that the catches are on the outside of the door. Unless they have a duplicate set inside – I hope that’s the case, but I don’t know how smart Chilean engineers are – that contraption looks worryingly Heath-Robinson to me, and this is a field I know about.

The last thing you want at the site of an emergency rescue operation, apart from a ravening press mob, is a slimy grandstanding politician, and here we have two. I’ve been at sites where there were dozens of the bastards, posing grinning in front of locations where corpses of victims had very recently been extracted. (In fairness, in those cases, the press were pretty good, they kept their distance and didn’t get in the way.) If you ever need anything to destroy your faith in human nature, that will do it. But that’s getting pretty far from the point. Sorry Zeeb, my brain seems to wander. Can’t imagine why.

In fact, my half-assed guess is that technology and “multi-tribalism” could decrease Dunbar’s number… it is probably harder to keep track of both within and between tribe relationships. I often have to think hard if two friends from different spheres know/have met each other.

I love the anthropologist pretending he knows something about the brain that no one knows. Proportional to neocortex size. Ha! Tell it to a meerkat. Or the Kim-puter.