Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Dunbar's Number

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

There’s a theory that all of us have a maximum number of friendships that we can maintain – 150, to be exact. Suspiciously exact, really, if you think about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the short stuff. Chucks on a roll. Let's giddy up. Jerry's here too. Let's go with short stuff. And speaking of Jerry, does this not start with a Seinfeld ref? Yeah, the boyfriend episode, part one. I don't remember that one. Walk me through it. I don't remember the episode either, but I definitely remember this part. So they're talking about meeting new friends in your 30s and how it's just basically impossible to do that I think Jerry says whatever group you've got is the one you're going with.

You're not interviewing, you're not looking at any new people, not interested in seeing any applications. And it's such a truism. Like as you get older, the chances of you making new friends or especially adding to your group, especially pre-social media, was really low. The chances were relatively low, especially compared to how you were as a kid. And it's not just necessarily because you lose interest in it. You potentially max out your friends by a certain age, say your 30s.

And the idea that we can even max out the number of friends we have suggests that there's like some sort of cognitive load that having friends puts on us and that we can only do so much. So we are limited to a certain amount of friends. Well, my friend, I would agree that in most cases that is true. But it's funny that I find the face of this because I have met a lot of friends since my 30s and in my 40s even. Wow. But a lot of it is because of this job.

And you know me, I'm kind of a friend collector anyway. Sure. And I just, I don't know. I was just thinking about it because of this stuff you sent me that like, I've met a lot of really, really good friends. You know, I've got my crew from way, way back from like high school and even college. But I've made a bunch of new friends and some are really close, but some are just sort of professional colleagues that I consider friends, but it's interesting.

And I've really enjoyed meeting new people in my 30s and 40s. That's awesome. Well, if this whole episode didn't make me feel like a loser before, it definitely does now. Well, I mean, you and I are different. You're more likely to keep your tribe small. True. And there's nothing wrong with that either. Well, curated is how I put it.

Yeah, but there's no right way to be. I know. I'm just teasing, of course. But I mean, that's sort of the yin and yang of us and why we work, I think, as partners. So let me ask you this then, Chuck, would you say that your number of friends, people you would call friends to one degree or another exceeds the 150? Well, no, that's a lot of friends. It is a lot of friends.

And the reason that that number is even out there is because of a British anthropologist, I believe from Oxford named Robin Dunbar, who, I'm just going to say it, became obsessed with the idea that you could, that there was a magic number, a limited number of friends, which is, okay, that's something in and of itself, but that you could actually predict the number of friends a species would have based on the size of their neocortex. Right, that there was a ratio between your neocortex and the amount of people that you could, it's almost like the amount of people you can manage before it starts falling apart.

And he studied this. He didn't just come up with a number. He studied primates at first and kind of, at least in that world, found it to be true. And basically said the size of your neocortex relative to your body size, and that's the part of the brain that handles language, right? In cognition. And also, like, just managing people and interacting with people, it starts there. Which is how it figures in here.

But that ratio basically will limit how complex of a cohort group that you can be a part of. Right, and so he took these primate studies that he conducted, doing FMRIs of neocortices of primates, and then looking at the size of their social groups, and then said, okay, let's apply this to humans. Humans are social animals. We're primates. Let's measure the size of the human, average size of the neocortex in a human. And just guess, like, or I guess extrapolate, based on our findings,

how big the average human social network would be. And he did that, and he came up with 150, and then he said about finding things that proved it. Right, but first he took a commercial break, and we'll be right back to talk about what he discovered. America loves its founding fathers. But that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. If you do not rise to the head, not only of your profession, but of your country, you will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy. So we're tracing John Quincy Adams' journey from the White House to the halls of Congress.

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So we all ended up at the hospital at the same time. The police, they not putting this all together. Like, this is still unsolved. To spirituality. To me, you know, it's really about having to get from God. You can sense things. This is about helping people. It's not about breaking them down. And family secrets. I don't know what's going on in everybody's family. People are a little less likely to talk about it open.

Listen to the Professional Homegirl podcast, whatever name, every Tuesday, presented to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network. On the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. So he landed on 150 and he, it wasn't just like friends. He, he looked at, you know, working groups and factories and military squadrons and, you know, ancient villages in England and Christmas card lists, all kinds of things. And he found that 150 sort of stuck in the anything above that it would either, you know, people would turn on each other and, you know, the case of like many,

many years ago, or it would just become too unwieldy to manage and splinter off into smaller groups. Yeah. Your Christmas card list goes over 150. All the people on are going to turn against each other. So he also said that even more fascinatingly, beyond the number 150, that's just one of several numbers that pop up. And mind bogglingly, they're all factors of five. Yeah. It seems so hinky.

In fact, oh, it seems super hinky. In fact, he said, you have five, the closest people, the people you consider your loved ones, usually number five. After that, you've got 15 good friends, 50 friends, 150 meaningful contacts, 500 acquaintances, 1500 people you can recognize. No. And then he said also, like this is not, these aren't like static lists, like people, depending on how frequently you interact with these people,

somebody from your recognized group can end up becoming one of your good friends if you see them enough and you hit it off and you connect. So they're not locked into any list. And your loved ones can turn on you and end up as just people you can recognize. Who knows? It depends on how your life goes. Yeah. And obviously, it's in a range. If you're an extrovert, you might have more acquaintances at least.

I think they found that women have a smaller number of, I guess, what would be considered good friends than men do. And it's interesting, though, that some organizations, and you got some of this stuff from this was an article on the BBC. BBC courts, biology letters, a few others. Good stuff. But some organizations have sort of adhered to this. Like they buy into it.

Like the Swedish Tax Authority, apparently, with their offices, they don't have more than 150 people in any particular location. Which is hilarious. I saw it pointed out in one of our sources. I don't remember which one. They said, I guess the Swedish Tax Authority is just presuming that its employees don't have friends or loved ones outside of work, because that totally undermines their entire pursuit there.

Oh, interesting. You know? I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. And some people say this is all bunk anyway. Right. Some people say it's completely bunk.

And then some people say there's something to that, but I just don't know about that 150 number. Right. So people have studied this and performed their own studies and have tried to reproduce Dunbar studies and have come up with different numbers. But they can come up with a number. It's just some of them are like 290.

I saw one of them came up with 611. But the thing is, Dunbar was convinced that it was a regression line where there was a, the data forms basically a bell curve where the average is the highest point and then the outliers are the smallest. And what a bunch of other studies have found is that it's probably actually what's called a power law, which is a huge steep curve that starts really high and then comes down and then evens out toward the bottom

and power laws happen when some people really skew the numbers upward, but then most people have far, far fewer say contacts than those people who are the actual outliers. So rather than the outliers being the fewest, the outliers have the most. And that changes a lot of stuff. So much so that I saw there was a one study that found that the 95% confidence interval had a range of between four and 520 contacts that the average person had.

So they kind of throw it out the window. Yeah, exactly. Wow, that's interesting. And of course, with the advent of social media in more recent years, depending on what, how old you are, you might, you know, some people our age might not consider those people friends, even though they may be like Facebook friends, even though neither one of us are on Facebook, you know what I'm saying, whereas I think

a younger generation might say like, oh no, those are my friends. And the, the, my gaming network that I play, like these people are my friends, we've never met or anything. So the idea of what friendship is means different things to different people. And a lot of times, depending on how old you are, what generation you're in. Right. And then Dunbar was saying that even still, he sees the same things hold on the online world as well. In that BBC article, he puts it that it's like the same design features of the human mind

that are imposing constraints on the number of individuals, like in the real world, also do so in the gaming world as well. Yeah. You know, which is pretty interesting. And then you also chucked us to wrap it up. You might be sitting there like, this is all fascinating, but it just feels like navel gazing to me. Why does any of this matter?

Right. Well, if you're like a demographer or an economist, coming up with a way to reliably predict group size, starting at the individual level, would let you count huge groups, like really accurately, would let you count groups that are hard to count, like victims of crimes who don't come forward, the homeless. There's a lot of people whose entire field would be revolutionized by being able to look at the size of a cortex and predict the number of people that person is

friends with, but it just doesn't seem to be fully holding up. It holds up enough that the Dunbar's number has stuck around this long, but it's not just proving reliable in case after case. Yeah. You know, I kind of went down this rabbit hole, interestingly recently, because when I went to LA for spring break. Did you make more friends there? No, I didn't make any friends that week.

I solidified some maybe, but I wanted to throw, I rented this house up in the Hollywood Hills with a pool, and I was like, hey, you know, I get to go back to LA and live like a hot shot for a week. And I wanted to throw a party, like a pool party, because I have a lot of friends out there with kids. And so I made a list, and I went down that rabbit hole of making a list of my LA friends, and I'm looking at it now, and it was like, you know, a list of friends. And then I even made a second list of fringe.

Yeah. So like people I consider my friends like Joe Randazzo and Janet Varney and her partner Brandon, like people that I'm like tight with. Like I consider those people, people like if they needed something, I would be there for them no matter what kind of friend. Yeah, that's a friend. And then the fringe was everything from professional colleagues that I've met here and there over the years all the way down to like I had this person on movie crush once and we really hit it off that day.

Right. But like we didn't keep in touch at all. But I just invited everyone. I just threw a really cast a wide net and like a lot of people came that really surprised me. And it was it was kind of fun and cool to have all these different people from 30 years of my life, because some people went way back with me from Atlanta that live out there. Yeah. And it was just kind of interesting to look at this list of people and now how it relates to

this episode. So you had new friends and old friends mingling together. How did it go? It went great. People that like a lot of the very little crossover. So a lot of people didn't. Most people didn't know one another and just getting to know each other. And it was like it was it was fun.

It was really neat. I could see putting your old friends and new friends together is a relatively low risk exercise because friends of Chucks aren't going to not get along with other friends of Chucks. You know, it was all good folks. And you know what? Big congratulations, our buddy, Josh Bierman. You remember Josh? Yeah. He came and I didn't expect him to come and he walks in with a brand new baby.

Oh, wow. Was it his? Yeah. Okay. Talk about a fun way to enter a party. I was like, oh my God, you've got this great, great new baby. And it was kind of a fun reveal. Very nice.

He had a cape that made the reveal even better. He's like, I've got a baby. Holy cow. Well, I guess that's it for short stuff, right? I think that means we're out, right? Yes.