Was Robin Dunbar right about his number?

And Why the Dunbar Number matters in 2022 and beyond.

In 1993 Robin Dunbar published a paper that changed our views of human relationships permanently. He suggested that humans could only really handle about 150 stable relationships at any one time. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got thousands of friends on Facebook or Twitter, he says — there’s no way you can be close to thousands of people simultaneously. Dunbar’s number ( around 150) as it’s now called, is a cognitive limit to the number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with. Dunbar’s studies say this is the general processing limitations of our brains.

Robin Dunbar is a Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, and he’s been applying his number to all sorts of human relationships ever since. The Dunbar Number hypothesis proposes that the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships will be constrained by the size of available groups based on Dunbars suggested ratio of 2:1 average social relationships: individuals within groups.

Most of us who engage in social media has a total of more than 150 connections. Many have ten times that many or more! So is there a downside to exceeding Dunbar’s number? Does it really matter at all since I can curate, slice and dice my social feed anyway I choose?

A mismatch between social media and Dunbar’s Number could mean we have a distorted sense of who our true friends are, according to Dunbar. He suggests that there is a direct correlation between feelings of loneliness and scrolling through the feeds of people that we cannot possibly know and engage with regularly. These connections give us the illusion of having relationships with others, and yet it leaves us empty and disconnected.

However, Dunbar does have his critics. Some have said that since this theory was proposed years before Facebook or other social media, it no longer applies to this type of technology and algorithms associated with it. Have we developed or evolved to actually “manage” more connections than around 150? Does the rise of social media and digital technology challenge or extend Dunbar’s Number? The jury is still out.

However, Dunbar does offers us a cautionary tale about technology and brain processing capacity, claiming that it leaves us with an overabundance of choices when in reality we can’t handle all these choices. He says curation is key and advises people to think carefully before adding more people to their social circles online.

How are we to think about and learn some things from Dunbar’s number? Here are a few things that I find helpful.

- Dunbar’s number is sort of like our “personal space”. It’s the limit to how much we can process at any one time.

- Dunbar told us that curation is key. This means self-control and filtering through contacts is important for maintaining healthy social relationships. For instance, Twitter lists are very useful for this.

- Dunbar’s number isn’t an exact science but more like a general guideline since there are always exceptions to any rule.

-Dunbar’s Number reminds us once again that it is more important whom you know online than how many new connections you have made…we must care more about quality over quantity.

Be discerning with your time and attention!