According to a theory called “Dunbar’s Number,” the maximum number of social relationships the human brain can keep track of is 150. Robin Dunbar, an Oxford University professor, postulated the social network theory.
Just as life imitates art, it could be said that Facebook, the ubiquitous social networking site with over 600 million users, imitates life. And that means the person with 1,463 friends that just added you is probably not being totally honest about the size of their entourage.
The reason for this can be easily summed up in a theory called “Dunbar’s Number,” which was named after and postulated by Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. Dunbar’s Number states that the rough maximum number of social relationships the average person’s brain can handle is 150.
“Partly, it’s a cognitive challenge just to keep track of more people,” Dunbar said at a lecture sponsored by the British Royal Society of Arts in 2010.
“The other side of it is, it’s just a time budgeting problem.”
Dunbar said that people just do not have the time to manage real relationships with more than 150 people.
“It seems as though the amount of time you need to invest is kind of proportional to the quality of the relationship,” he said. “Or should I say the quality of the relationship is proportional to the amount of time you spend doing stuff with people.”
Leeda Copley, professor of sociology at UCO, thinks the question of why we can only handle 150 relationships, while not wrong, is somewhat missing the point.
“As a sociologist, I tend to ask why is it so many?” Copley said. “I don’t think early humans would have had 150 family members, so that means those social relationships had to involve people you weren’t related to.”
Copley believes that Dunbar’s Number actually says something very interesting about human social interactions.
“Of course humans are social creatures, so that isn’t really news per se, but I think the excitement is in knowing that communities capped at around 150 were for some reason successful,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful example of how our biological nature influences our social patterns, and vice versa.”
So what about the Facebook users with 350 friends or more?
“I think most people know and understand — even if they don’t think about it — that of those 350 friends, it really is a few core ‘best’ friends, then perhaps a larger group of ‘friends,’ and finally, a bunch of people who would be better described as former friends, acquaintances, or let’s be honest, complete strangers,” she said.
Given enough time, and with global communications improving our connection with the rest of the world, it’s possible that the concept of Dunbar’s Number could become obsolete. But right now, according to Copley, that’s still far off.
“Interestingly, there is still some sociological evidence that, for a lot of people, their mental health is less about how large their network is and more about how close it is,” she said. “Quality is more important than quantity.”