Assignment
Dunbar's Number
THE MISCONCEPTION: There is a Rolodex in your head with the names and faces of everyone you've ever known.
THE TRUTH: You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.
Think of a cup completely filled with water. You try to add one drop to this cup, and one drop spills out. You try to pour a cup of water into it, and a cup of water spills out. This is called a zero-sum system. To add anything to it you must remove an equal proportion.
The bank of names and faces and relationships in your mind, the one you use to keep up with who is a friend, who is a foe, and who is a potential mate-this bank is a zero-sum system too. The reason for this doesn't really have to do with how much space you have to keep the information, it has to do with how much energy you have on tap to devote to worrying about your place in your social world.
In other primates, social relationships are maintained by grooming-picking bugs off of one another. You don't go to a [Netflix] party and dig around in your friend's hair while watching a show, but getting together for any reason is still a grooming behavior. You hang out, work on projects, and talk on the phone to keep connected. Visiting friends just to shoot the shit is the human equivalent of picking ticks off of one another's backs. As technology has allowed you to be farther and farther apart yet still keep in touch with loved ones, your grooming behavior has remained constant. In fact, most of your innate gregariousness works as it always has by adapting to the norms of the era. In modern life, human relationships are no longer separated geographically. Modern humans are deeply interconnected.
But you can't keep up with all those people and their connections, not in a real social way-you are not so smart. The truth is, out of this cluster of humans you can reliably manage to keep up with only around 150 people. More specifically, it's between 150 and 230. Giant cities full of other humans, Internet social networks with hundreds of people sharing status updates, corporations with branches around the world-your brain is incapable of handling the multitude of human contacts populating these examples. Psychology has shown us the brain is not like a hard drive, so the problem with too many relationships isn't a space issue. The problem is more about the economic limits of your mental human relations department.
Why is that?
The neocortex of primates is the part of the brain responsible for keeping up with others. For each primate the size of the cortex correlates with the size of the average social group. Apes live in small groups; humans live in big ones. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who first presented this concept, figures the size of the average group is directly correlated with how efficiently the members can socially groom one another. According to Dunbar, the larger the group, the more time must be spent by each member to maintain social cohesion. Each person must do some grooming with each other person and then also keep up with who is friends with whom, who has a beef, and what each other's relative status is compared to his or hers and others'. The complexity builds exponentially with each new member. Your brain was shaped in a world where this time [spent grooming] also took away from other efforts-like hunting, gathering, and building shelter. There is a maximum amount of time and effort you can spend-it is a zero-sum system.
Sure enough, all the sciences that study tribes, bands, and villages have approximated ancient groups usually maxed out around 150 people. This is the approximate limit to how many people you can trust and count on for favors. Once people started coming up with ways to maintain larger groups, like armies, cities, and nations, humans started subdividing those groups. Dunbar's number explains why big groups are made of smaller, more manageable groups like companies, platoons, and squads-or branches, divisions, departments, and committees.
Dunbar's number isn't fixed. It can be increased or decreased depending on the environment and the tools you have available. You most likely have a much smaller group of friends, but when you are incentivized to connect to more people-like at your job or at school-150 is the point where your neocortex cries uncle. With better tools-like telephones, Facebook, e-mail, World of Warcraft guilds, and so on-you become slightly more efficient at maintaining relationships, so the number can be larger, but not much larger. Dunbar's most recent research suggests even power-users of Facebook with 1,000 or more friends still communicate regularly with only about 150 people, and of that 150, they strongly communicate with a group of less than 20.
The social Web is revolutionizing the way institutions operate, and the way people communicate, but in the end it might not have much of an effect on the core social group you depend on for true friendship. You can maintain a giant number of weak ties to people on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever comes next, much like you can in a giant company. Strong ties, however, require constant grooming. People who use the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing are fooling themselves. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret only with a handful of true friends.
David McRaney, You are Not so Smart 2011
A. What is the tone? Explain with examples from the reading.
B. What is the main argument?
C. What kind of evidence does the author offer and is it relevant? Why?
D. Does he use figurative language, analogy, allusions? If so (or if not), what is the effect?