Source | ideas.ted.com
Going through a global pandemic has brought us together in some ways, but it’s also separated many of us from our routine interactions with friends and acquaintances. And in doing so, it’s led us to look at our relationships and reflect on the ones we’d like to add to our lives — and the ones we’ve left behind.
Voraciously curious data journalist Mona Chalabi has been thinking about her friendships too, and she recently explored this topic in her podcast Am I Normal?. Here’s an excerpt from that episode, where Chalabi speaks with renowned friendship researcher Robin Dunbar PhD, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University:
Mona Chalabi: According to Dunbar, our apple basket of relationships has an average of 150 people in it. This 150 figure is referred to as “Dunbar’s number“. Now it might seem high, but what Dunbar is looking at is the number of relationships the brain can handle at one time. This includes family, best friends, acquaintances, workmates, even the bartender you know by name. So they’re friends of a wide range of types.
Dunbar has studied social relationships since the ’70s, first in primates and then in humans. He developed the number while studying primates’ social networks. And that was when he noticed that the size of those social groups was relative to the size of the primates’ brains.
“Introverts prefer to have fewer friends,” says Dr. Dunbar. “They probably sort of hover around the 100 – 150 mark.”
Robin Dunbar: And so I just, out of idle curiosity, thought, “Well, what happens if we stick human brains into this equation?” And when we did that, it gave this figure of 150. And that number then just kept turning up all over the place.
Chalabi: The figure popped up in surprising places — offices, communes, even Christmas card lists. 150 is also the estimated size of Neolithic farming villages in the Middle East and 11th-century Britain … Dunbar says 150 for simplicity, but really, it’s a range between 100 and 250, depending on several factors.
Dunbar: One is obviously personality. So introverts prefer to have fewer friends. They probably sort of hover around the 100 – 150 mark …
Chalabi: Another factor is age.
Dunbar: The size of personal social networks over the lifespan increases as you grow through childhood, hits a peak somewhere in the late teens, early 20s at something approaching about 250. And then from about the 30s, surprisingly coinciding with reproduction, it drops to about 150 after which it remains very stable.
