Alan Alda and Robin Dunbar discuss Dunbar's number
Can you count your friends and sort them into which circle they belong to is it your closest 1.5 friend(s), your 5 besties, the 15 people you spend the most time with, the 50 people you are close to, 150 in your wider circle of friends, your 500 acquaintances, the 1500 people you can name, or the 5000 people you might recognize if you see? If so, you are grouping them according to Dunbar's number. Alan Alda had a conversation with Robin Dunbar about his magic numbers and what they might mean both on and off of an online platform.
Dunbar states that there are limits on the number of friends and family that you can have. Different species of animals have different numbers which correlates with the size of frontal cortex. His claim that humans can only have 150 friends fits with the frontal cortex correlation. The number is an average, not everyone will have 150 in their social network. for instance, extroverts might be up to 200. Examples that Dunbar gave included that the size of a hunter gatherer groups is an average of 148. That if you average the size of villages in Italy over the last 800 years you get 145 people. Hutterite communities’ average size is 165 then they split. The elders say that their community doesn’t run democratically, when it gets bigger. It's only after 150 that you have to have laws and courts and police because people no longer respond to each other as friends and family. The fact that people witness your behavior is important. This shows in higher crime rates when you are in a community that is too large to know everyone. Average friends that someone will have on Facebook is 149 when they looked at 61 million random Facebook users. Even if you have more on Facebook, it is likely that you will only have about 150 that would be happy to see you if you just showed up at their place or event.
When you are looking at the factors that establish friendship, you can think of it as the being the same as monkey's grooming behavior. Our grooming behavior exists as forms of physical touch, hugging, stroking. The motion triggers endorphins and good feeling. Grooming is really only done with the inner 50 friends in your circle. Culture does have something to do with it, but not much. Other activities also trigger endorphins including laughter, singing, dancing, religious rituals, and eating and drinking together. An hour of singing together, makes complete strangers feel like they are friends for life.
The more friends and better quality of friends that you have the longer you will live statistically. This is not only because they will bring you a bowl of soup, but also because the endorphins (which are opioids) that make you feel better trigger the body's natural killer immune system. When Dunbar was asked about the 1.5 closest people, he said that it was simple females tend to have two, one romantic and 1 female bff and the identity of the person matters more. Men tend to have one, either another male or a romantic partner but rarely both. To men apparently one guy is as good as the next.
The pandemic has disrupted friendships beyond fifteen people because regular contacts are lost. In the best of times turnover of friends is 40% every year of where a friend fits into your friend circle, because in the relationship model your friendships are always growing or dying. Older people after 60 start having smaller circles because of loss of friends without making more and the pandemic has hastened that loss. People are drawn together by shared interests and similar sense of humor. The seven pillars of friendship include, having the same language or dialect, growing up in the same area, same educational trajectory (profession in common), having the same hobbies and interests, same worldview, same musical and humor.
Alda, A. (Host). (2022). Robin Dunbar: Circles of Friendship; Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda [audio podcast] available at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/robin-dunbar-circles-of-friendship/id1400082430?i=1000547508928
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