I’ve stood in a thousand street scenes, just around the corner from you, on the edge of a dream that you have. Has anybody ever told you it’s not comin’ true?
The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network.
Back in early 90s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying the social groups of various kinds of primates. Before long, he noticed something odd.
Primates tend to maintain social contact with a limited number of individuals within their group. But here’s the thing: primates with bigger brains tended to have a bigger circle of friends. Dunbar reasoned that this was because the number of individuals a primate could track was limited by brain volume.
Then he did something interesting. He plotted brain size against number of contacts and extrapolated to see how many friends a human ought to be able to handle. The number turned out to be about 150.
Since then, various studies have actually measured the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with. These all show that Dunbar was just about spot on (although there is a fair spread in the results).
What’s more, this number appears to have been constant throughout human history–from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books.
But in the last decade or so, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect. Twitter, for example, vastly increases the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others. It’s not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others.
So it’s easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number. Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University.
related { What Do People Actually Tweet About? }
photo { Isaac McKay-Randozz }
