The fourth season of the “Listen, It’s Easy” podcast has started! First issue - about Dunbar's number
Miscellaneous / / October 25, 2023
Let's figure out how studying primates helps people build business teams and social networks.
Observing social grooming in monkeys, British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar got the idea to understand how the size of the brains of primates affects their ability to establish intragroup communications. He looked at how often different species of monkeys scratched each other's fleas, and compared this information with the structure of the animals' brains. The researcher was especially interested in the neocortex. Based on all the data collected, Dunbar used mathematics revealed regularity: the larger the neocortex, the easier it is for the primate to establish contact with its relatives through grooming.
Dunbar Study Results decided extrapolate to people. And he came to the conclusion that a person with an average brain size can have and maintain up to 148 stable social connections. For convenience, their number is usually rounded to 150. Actually, this is Dunbar's number. We will tell you more about it and the areas in which the research results are applied in the new issue.
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Numbers in our lives1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣
- Dunbar's number: is it true that we cannot maintain more than 150 social connections?
- 7 non-obvious statistical relationships that are scientifically proven
- Numbers lie: how we are manipulated using data