Dunbar's Number: Why We Can't Have More Than 150 Friends

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/02/18/Robin_Dunba...

Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar expands on "Dunbar's number," his theory that the maximum number of stable relationships a person can maintain is approximately 150. Time to delete a few hundred Facebook friends?

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We are the product of our evolutionary history, and that history colors our experience of everyday life -- from the number of friends we have to how religious we are. Renowned evolutionary anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar visits the RSA to explain how the very distant past underpins all of our current behaviors, and how we can best utilize that knowledge.

Did you know that you have just 150 friends, acquaintances and relatives? And that this is a natural size for villages all over the world? Now known as "Dunbar's Number," it defines the feasible boundaries of our social lives. Dunbar's investigations show us that we inherited the social side of our brains from our mother, and the emotional side from our father; why many women see the world in four or even five different colors, but men only ever have the conventional red, green and blue; and why facial symmetry has everything to do with voter choices in elections. - RSA

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, specializing in primate behavior. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, roughly 150, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".

Professor Dunbar is a director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project (BACRP) "From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain" and is involved in the planned BACRP "Identifying the Universal Religious Repertoire".

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[Gunriffun9mm]

I have zero friends because I am god.

[fringeelements]

I can't believe Robin Dunbar can't see the implications of his own research on the viability of socialism.

[ColonelFlustercluck]

And on the flipside, the woman is equally as likely to abandon the friendship with the man when his true motives become apparent, unless, as previously stated, she values the friendship enough to put up with the sexual tension resulting from such an asymetrical relationship.

[ColonelFlustercluck]

I'll go ahead and say it. Women are the ones who claim to have more friends. Especially attractive ones and more especially attractive ones with attractive personalities. Many of these so called "friends" are males who are simply in the "friendship" with the woman because they want a relationship or more basically sex, but will abandon the "friendship" when it becomes apparent that they cannot achieve their biological goals with the woman, unless the friendship is worth more, which is rare.

[thebobbalo1]

I have zero friends because I am a flying spaghetti monster.

[combatcat91]

i have zero friends to because i am buddah ...

[liftedJ33P]

i have 151 :/ ... i'm here because i just noticed 85% of my friends have atleast 800 friends

[Sir Phillip]

This information is GREAT! But this guy is boring as fuck!

[JakeOfAllTrades17]

For the people saying you have over this many, this is referring to actually being friends with them, not just knowing who they are and having met them. And they are not close friends either, you can only have I think 5-6 close friends? According to another rule haaha

[JakeOfAllTrades17]

It is not saying if you know who they are or not, it is saying that you maintain a friendship with them. You do not have a stable friendship with 1,386 people.

[Tyler Ingram]

what does that mean?

[gregormartin91]

this guy has the whole idea of facebook wrong.