Can you have more than 150 friends? New study suggests you can
Just how many friends tin one person have? In a 1993 report, Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, theorised that humans could accept no more than nearly 150 meaningful relationships, a measure that became known as Dunbar'due south number.
Merely researchers at Stockholm University published a newspaper last week calling that number into question, finding that people could take far more than friends if they put in the try.
"We can larn thousands of digits of pi, and if we engage with lots of people, and then nosotros will become better at having relationships with lots of people," said Johan Lind, an author of the study and an associate professor at Stockholm University.
The paper was published in the journal Biological science Letters.
In his original inquiry, Dunbar studied monkeys and apes and determined that the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for witting idea, correlated with the size of the groups they lived amidst.
The neocortex in humans is even larger, so he extrapolated that their ideal group size was, on average, 150.
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In the new written report, Lind said he and his team used updated data sets and statistical methods and establish that the size of the neocortex did not limit the number of connections people could maintain.
Dunbar'southward number, he said, "has been criticised for quite a long time." Lind'south team found that no maximum number of friendships could exist established with any precision.
In an interview, Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, defended his inquiry.
The new analysis, he said, "is bonkers, absolutely bonkers," adding that the Stockholm University researchers conducted a flawed statistical analysis and misunderstood both the nuances of his analyses and of human connections.
"I marvel at their credible failure to understand relationships," he said.
Dunbar defines meaningful relationships as those people you know well enough to greet without feeling bad-mannered if you ran into them in an airport lounge. That number typically ranges from 100 to 250, with the average effectually 150, he said.
At birth, it starts at one or two. Friendships tiptop in the tardily teens and early 20s.
By their 30s, people tend to have about 150 connections, and that number remains flat until people reach their late 60s and early 70s, when their number of connections, Dunbar said, "starts to collapse." "If you alive long plenty, it gets back to one or two."
In his book How Many Friends Does Ane Person Need, Dunbar pointed to historical and modern-twenty-four hour period examples to back up his inquiry.
Effectually 6000 BC, the size of Neolithic villages from the Middle East was 120 to 150 people, judging by the number of dwellings.
In 1086, the average size of virtually English language villages recorded in the Domesday Volume was 160 people. In modernistic armies, fighting units contain an average of 130 to 150 people, he said.
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In 2007, when the Swedish taxation agency was restructuring, a strategist for the agency proposed that each of the new offices have well-nigh 100 to 150 employees, citing Dunbar'due south research.
Employees, already unhappy with the restructuring, got wind of the plan and complained about existence compared to monkeys. (Dunbar'due south number did non, in the end, play any part in the agency's restructuring, according to three officials involved with the plans.)
While it may be comforting to think that there is an optimal number of people with whom nosotros should surroundings ourselves, in reality there is not one rule that applies to all of us, said Louise Barrett, a psychology professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada.
"Man life is really complicated," she said.
Barrett, a biological anthropologist who was not involved in the new written report and who previously studied nether Dunbar, said the assay looked robust.
"Nosotros need to rethink and adjust our interpretation and hypotheses in light of this new data," she said.
The contend over relationships comes as people are rethinking which friendships they want to recultivate after the pandemic shrank social circles and as businesses are designing mail-pandemic piece of work spaces.
Dunbar posited his theory decades agone, in the early days of the cyberspace and long before social media sites changed how people communicate.
"This number would brand sense if we withal relied on a Rolodex and talking to people, just that'southward not the globe we live in," said Angela Lee, a professor at Columbia Business School.
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Networking tools like LinkedIn accept made it possible to increase the number of connections we can maintain, and this is important because research shows that people on the outer edge of our networks are often the ones who cease up beingness the most helpful for career advocacy or generating creative ideas, she said.
Dunbar contended that his theory is still viable, even in today's hyper-connected world, since the quality of connections on social networks is often low.
"These are not personalised relationships," he said.
What volition the pandemic mean for rebuilding meaningful connections, whether at work or in our social lives? It is probably too early to say, but Dunbar predicted that the biggest effects on networks would be on older people.
"Their friendship circles were already failing and this volition push button them further downwardly that slope," he said.
Dunbar said that, while he tries not to analyse himself, he guessed he had near 150 friends.
"Information technology'due south adequately blatantly obvious to near people when they sit downward and recollect about it that that's how their social network is organised," he said.
Dunbar's number, he said, is not going anywhere.
By Jenny Gross © The New York Times
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
https://world wide web.nytimes.com/2021/05/eleven/science/dunbars-number-debunked.html
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/wellness/can-you-have-more-150-friends-new-study-suggests-you-can-252666
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