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You Can Only Have 150 Friends - Dunbar's Numbers Explained

2,683 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jun 18, 2023
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Slog Reference: Dunbar's Number: You can never have more than 150 friends

Description

Why you can only have 150 friends. Dunbar's numbers roughly suggest the limits of human brains to form relationships. These numbers also estimate the intimacy of the relationships. And this is the theory that says that you can't have more than 150 friends, more than 5 best and the most intimate relationships. It also tries to explain why old relationships tend to lose their charm once you form new ones. It's a fascinating concept, and you should definitely learn more about it in this episode of FutureIQ.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Dunbar's Number: You can never have more than 150 friends

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Transcript

did you know that there is this company called WL Gore which has offices that can only hold 150 people okay it's a large company but what happens is that whenever the number of people go beyond 150 in any one office they built an entire new building and that building also they make uh space only for 150 people right so they just have this large number of building offices each with 150 people so they clearly have the money to build more offices but they will not put more than 150 people in an office correct why do you think that is 150 is their lucky number or something no not at all in fact the Swedish tax
Authority recently restructured their offices so that each office has only 150 people 150 yeah okay and the reason for that comes actually from anthropology where basically there is a rule saying that humans on an average can have only 150 friends okay so let me explain this I have seen Facebook pages and Facebook profiles with numbers in thousands and you are saying only 150. so I will explain right I mean basically it means that your Facebook friends are not real friends okay but let me know right I don't have a Facebook but still ah this 150 by the way is called dunbar's number and that's what we are discussing today so um an anthropologist called Robin Dunbar
he had the bright idea of looking at the sizes of groups of monkeys and apes and other pyramids okay uh that uh I mean what is the natural group size that they have in the jungle right okay and what he noticed that each species has a certain size and they stick to that size that is the first thing you noticed okay then he had this idea of trying to figure out if there is any correlation between the size of their brain and the size of the groups that they form right and when he plotted them for monkeys and IPS uh on a graph right on the y-axis it is the size of the group on
the x-axis it is the size of the brain and what he saw were all the dots were and what it told him was that the brain has gives you a limit on how many monkeys you can have in your group so uh as the size of the show as the size of the brain increased the size of the social group also increased consistently with a certain correction right so what it means is that your a given brain is capable of only handling a certain number of relationships so it is ideal to live in groups of that size because you can have that many relationships with the monkeys and if you add more monkeys to the group now
social relationships break down because you no longer know all the monkeys in your group right so larger groups don't really work very well so of course Robin had the bright idea of taking the average human brain size and plotting it on the same graph and come up with the number 150. ah then he went back and studied tribes right and he looked the typically average tribal size group size is around 150 right I mean there is a range like 130 to 230 or something like that but 150 seems like a natural size for human groups because that's the number of friends right people you know people you are sort of understand uh and you can have a decent relationship with
150 right more than that and they stop being real people they become just stereotypes and you no longer care about them as much right wow you can't care about more than 150 people this is this is making me evaluate my entire life in so many ways I can't even begin to describe that's the whole point of this entire Channel okay evaluate your life in ways you can't even imagine and describe yes wow and I get to do that every single week with every single episode I hope you do too if you if this channel has led you to evaluate your life in a entirely different way in an entirely different way post it in the
comments and let us know in fact you know I can argue that the reason social media is so toxic as compared to your real life right in real life in your neighborhood right you don't go around being angry at people and outraging right if somebody does something bad you go and talk to them nicely why do you talk to them nicely because you know them as a person right you know that this person has two kids and those kids are cute and this person wakes up early every day for those kids and this person also uh takes really good care of the garden a whole bunch of things you know right whereas on social media there's just it's just standards
and numbers yeah you can keep track of more than 150 and that leads to like I said it leads to a breakdown of the social relationships when the size is larger yeah right in fact that's what those companies were trying to do it be even it would be a very interesting analysis to carry out on people's individual social media profiles to see how many people they interact with on a daily basis yes this what it has been actually done before that let me though explain One More Concept right okay what Dunbar did was when he was studying the group sizes he noticed that there were different kinds of groups okay okay so there were like an entire tribe is around 150 but
within trip there were smaller groups makes sense did various things together and he noticed that again and again the same numbers would show up okay like you know a small group of five another small group of around 15 or a group around 50 then 150. 5 15 50 150 okay and uh so this it's always a factor of three nobody really knows why it is but we have these different group sizes so now this whole entire series is called uh Dunbar numbers not just numbers right okay so everybody has around five close friends right close friends cousin who know everything that's going on with you whose shoulder you cry on right uh so those are like your jiggery those right
soulmate two spots empty contact me in fact this is an important concept right empty spots because what it means and by the way you spent 40 percent of your time with these five close friends oh okay okay but also it means you can't have more than five of those because your brain does not have the capacity to handle more than five such friendships okay which means that when what does it mean you can't have because if I make a new close friend doesn't that become the sixth person no you end up dropping one of the other people you spend less time with them okay oh yeah this is what happens sorry a new romantic relationship causes you to lose friends
okay and this is actually something that even parents complain about right oh you got married and now you don't have time for us it is true Dunbar number is an evolutionary reason for that thank you so much for giving me the excuse right the next bigger number five times three is your 15 good close friends right not like soul mates but close friends these are the people you want to actually have fun with these are the people you can trust your children with right that's around 15. the next bigger number is oh before I go to the next bigger number let me talk about this 15 okay it's an important number please Amazon is famous I mean Amazon is one of
the most successful companies in the world right I was really worried when you said Amazon is famous like duh so Amazon is famous for having what they call two Pizza teams okay okay uh Bezos insists that any team that works on um you know single project must be of roughly 15 people because you know a team shouldn't be larger than what two large pizzas can feed right that's why he calls it two Pizza teams but what you notice is that this is 15 the second Dunbar number this are the people this is the maximum number of people you can handle whom you can trust with important things right interesting goes beyond 15 and now you
no longer there are people you no longer can trust because you can't keep track of what all they are doing and you don't understand the stunts and weaknesses as well and so on right this is it fascinating basically when it grows beyond 15 you have to break it up into multiple groups and give different managers to them okay if you are a software developer and you are working in a team tell us what your team sizes let's let's do like a informal service tropical kind of a thing in the comments and let us see if uh your company believes in the Dunbar number the second Dunbar number this is the second Dunbar number I'm assuming yeah or not anyway
yeah the next Dunbar number is 50 okay so those are the the friends uh good friends right so if you are going to have a big birthday party right next to 50 you will call the 15 are the close friends yes and the 50 are good friends correct right so close friends are the ones you trust with your children the good friends 50 are the ones you will call to your birthday party Ah that's right um and um then after that three times of that is 150 which is the Dunbar number which is your friends people you know once you start going beyond that right 500 150 times 3 roughly 500 would be acquaintances right okay people whose
names you know right uh well not I mean you sort of know them you meet them once a year sort of as in if you meet them you'll be able to say hi hello how are you doing and ask them one personal question about them yeah fifteen hundred the next number is your acquaintances right the known names but some of them you might not remember any of the other details right and then beyond that 5000 is the known faces I said face looks very familiar but I can't remember his name something that happens to me a lot right never mind sorry ah so there is five which is the absolute Inner Circle then there is 15
which is your close friends then there is 50 which is your good friends good friends then there is 150 which is the number of people you can hold information about let's relationships yeah relationships then there is 500 which is you just know them like acquaintances and then there is 1500 and 5000 correct yeah and these are numbers that people have found empirically by studying how humans behave right and you pointed out social media so there is actual research right so in 2007 or so uh one research group took um um around 6 billion phone calls right and they analyzed who is calling whom and how many times and so on okay in that they cut out like transactional
calls that you're making to order pizza or something like that yeah and they cut out business calls right so we're talking about friends and acquaintances and so on listen you might develop a friendship with the pizza guy that you call regularly I am not questioning that but in in terms of the research but so what that study showed I mean what they did was they just looked at all the data and they saw whether there are groupings in the data with different Behavior right based on how often you call them and they noticed that there are actually Four distinct groups right so around three to four people you call once a week or more there is that group and then there is
sort of a blank space and then suddenly now there is like you know 11 to 15 people that you call once a month but not once a week right okay and then again there's a bit of a black space and then another bump around uh 30 okay and then another bump around 130 is the 130 is the people you call it sort of once a year right so happy birthday how are you Happy Birthday terms yeah um what you will notice is this multiply by Three is coming in this each time although the number seems to be a little different from what I said earlier they are a little lower huh and what they said was that you know because these are
only phone calls right the difference I mean you have a few more people that you see in person but you don't call as often yeah I would at least add one more person uh who is a neighbor who is your work or desk mate who is your I mean people that you meet regularly but you don't need to necessarily call regularly yeah so in general I think this analysis shows that something like the Dunbar number actually exists in real life even when you are using social media correct because otherwise you would expect like a continuous uh number and not these discrete jumps of 4 11 30 and what 130 right fascinating fascinating so uh you've talked about the two companies
before the WL Gore and the Swedish tax authorities did they also then do it on the basis of Dunbar number did it just WL Gore this is the company that makes gortex brand of uh breathable waterproof clothing used in sports like you know all the runners and all that will use that okay so it's a successful company and they did this uh you know they discovered it okay okay they just tried various things and after experimentation they figured out that 150 is the right number independent of Denmark's research whereas Swedish tax Authority did it after knowing about the number or right but there are lots of examples in the world where people have hit upon this
like uh you know Bezos 15 two Pizza teams I don't think it was based on a knowledge of Dunbar number he hit up on that and just noticed that it works very well so but that's the beauty of mathematics it does tend to reappear in in places where you wouldn't expect it to right right so it happens naturally if you are smart about it but now that you know that this exists you can be extra smart about it not over smart extra smart you can be smart without having to go through the years of trial and error correct but interestingly uh since you said here as I was thinking just about the years past we had the
pandemic we had the lockdown wow the from meeting people IRL in real life yeah how how did how did Dunbar number in that situation get affected or so um I mean I'm not looked at the research there but my guess is that you know you need a Denmark number of five that you are spending a lot of time with and lockdown and that has to be face to face right because Revolution from 100 000 years ago correct uh so uh most people during covet could probably have just two or three that they were interacting with so there was a gap there a need that wasn't fulfilled and that is why I think a lot of people
spent a couple of years being lonely or just feeling a little off right I'm guessing the extroverts must have especially felt the problem uh heavily because they weren't able to go out and yeah actually so that's the other thing I wanted to mention which is that this Dunbar number isn't like a precise number right okay okay it's a range so some people I mean when I say five some people need only three some people do seven eight correct but that five close friends is not going to be 50 in most cases right but there is a range extroverts have bigger Dunbar numbers and introverts have smaller than bar numbers and I have heard that say
Sharad power I've heard people say that 10 years ago you had pitched some idea to him and then you meet him again and he will remember that right so there are a few freaks who probably go like Way Beyond the possibilities not calling Mr power a freak by the way it is just the concept that he's trying to explain and for those who don't know uh Mr Sharad pawar is a very famous politician in Maharashtra India and he is rumored to have a very powerful memory like he'll remember obscure details from 10 15 years ago is what we've heard we haven't had the opportunity to meet him if we do meet him uh now and 15 years from now
we'll be able to verify this fact for sure but not sure if that is ever happening so anyway uh is Dunbar number something that we should maybe aspire to in at our workplace like WL Gore did or like the Swedish tax authorities did it should be to that should we make it happen so I think it is good to think of it as a rough guideline okay I mean always be ready to experiment and look at uh the results right always monitor things but uh I mean at the very least now that you know about the Denmark numbers that should guide your experimentation right your sure experimentation should be in that direction and you can reach the ideal setups faster
because now you know what to look for what kind of experimentation are we talking about here like trying to figure out which one of your friends comes into the Inner Circle and which one to kick out well actually experimentation I was talking about was you know if your manager at a company and what team size there should be but sure manage your own life like a software company following the Dunbar number yeah all right uh so that was Dunbar number this is shrikanth that's Naveen thank you