Friends? No, this sounds more like the number of people you can reasonably remember by name. Not necessarily friends.
Dunbar’s Number is the number of people who can be in a group where you know the status of everyone’s relationship to everyone else.
It means if you live in a village of Dunbar’s Number population, and you see two randomly selected villagers interacting, you already know the context of their relationship so you can interpret what their interactions mean.
You know if they are friends, enemies, lovers, coworkers, etc.
It’s a Facebook definition of friends.
Theres no fucking way i can remember 300 people. It will take myself years until I even know all of them. Its been 4 months and I still don’t even know more than maybe 10 Persons from my semester so it will take forever to get to know that much people.
Like, all at the same time?
In a row?
Define “friend” tho.
It’s crazy to think that while we now live in a globalized, interconnected society with billions of peoples yet Dunbar’s hasn’t changed from when we formed tribes and harmlets thousands of years ago.
A lot of the structures and institutions of modern society essentially center around somehow overcoming or side stepping Dunbar’s number: to reliably interact with strangers, ease tensions and achieve greater things (from credit scores to spelling dictionaries to standard sized clothing to electing representatives to online wikis to opening hours, calendars and time zones; the list goes on an on).
Yeah, basically beyond Dunbar’s Number your society needs something like honor to function. Below that number, empathy alone is sufficient to ensure social order. But beyond that you need honor or law, and the personality trait that makes it possible in the individual is conscientiousness.
Another way to look at it is that for small numbers of people you can rely on people to treat others well because they like them. That’s empathy at work as a social cohesive principle.
For larger groups you need to rely on people to treat others well because it’s the right thing to do. That’s conscientiousness at work as a social cohesive principle.
Empathy requires high bandwidth connection with other people and is limited in number of relationships it can serve. Conscientious requires dedication to principles, and is basically infinitely scalable. Someone walks into your store and you treat them well because you pride yourself on being a good shop owner. That’s conscientiousness. That’s how post-Dunbar societies operate.
TWO friends??? What do they think I am??? Tolerant enough of other peoples bullshit to be friends with TWO people??? Psssshhhh, let’s work on me tolerating ONE person first, before you try to double that number.
I’m not sure if it was ever said that you couldn’t be your own friend, so maybe that kind of gives you something to start with.
That said, you’d of course have to kind of get along with yourself first. Dunno if I could, tbh.
This is old and the formatting is hosed, but explains everything you need to know about groups of humans. BTW, the number is about 150.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
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