I’ll write from my perspective as a 41-year-old
woman living in an American suburb in 2015. When I write about American life
and perspectives it’s because I live here. I don’t speak for all Americans nor
do I intend to imply that America is the center of the universe or the only
good place to live. But it’s what I know so I see the world through that lens.
Backing up to Dunbar’s use of the word “tribe.”
When I hear that word I think of times past, when people literally lived with a
certain group, sometimes nomadically. Everything they needed was hunted,
gathered or made by the tribe. Life was communal. “Tribe” connotes a group that
needs to stick together for safety and survival. Outsiders were looked on suspiciously
as a potential threat to the tribe’s wellbeing. Tribes did not email other tribes
on the other side of the world.
In 2015 in America we may not see ourselves as
living in tribes. (Of course, there are groups who live separately even if they
live in relatively close proximity to others. The Amish come to mind. I’m
intrigued by them. More on that—someday.) But perhaps our connections to others
really are the descendants of tribal connections. The tribe is less homogenous
than it once was, but maybe we’re still tribal after all. In today’s society,
tribe doesn’t have the same meaning it once did. But Dunbar uses this term because
it describes the concept of grouping, even if the groups aren’t physically
close to one another.
Adjustments to my Christmas card list last month didn’t
lead me to ponder tribes for the first time. I think of the concept of tribes quite
a bit, actually. Every year I meet new people through my kids’ two schools.
Friends and neighbors move away. Others move in. My circle of friends and
family members changes yearly. I feel overwhelmed as I think of all the people
I’d like to see or catch up with. But I still only have 24 hours in a day. I
must take inventory periodically and decide which connections I will prioritize.
Dunbar has found that the average number of
people one can maintain a real connection to is 150. He backs this number up in
various ways. Dunbar studied tribe size and behavior but also takes a look a
scientific measurements such as neocortex size.
After a while the scientific stuff starts ricocheting
around in my brain like a pink pong ball on Red Bull. I’m mean, how often in daily speech am I using
the word “neocortex?” Not very often, especially on weekends! But I relate to
the point Dunbar was making. Even if Dunbar’s analysis did not include a
scientific look at brain size, I still would see his points as valid based on
social behavior alone. We humans can’t maintain an infinite number of relationships.
Relationships take time and energy and a true mutual interest if they are to
grow and do well. You can’t have 5,000 real friends. (Yes, this is a jab at
Facebook! Why do they limit it to 5,000? Is that a reasonable limit, in their
eyes? 5,100 would be preposterous but 5,000 is completely manageable?! I am
not a Facebook user. I did try it once, years ago, in order to read a writer
friend’s work, which was posted there. But I don’t like how it shoves people at
you and compares notes on how many friends all the other people have. So
junior-high-ish! At times I’ve felt ignored by those I thought were real
friends because they were so busy with their Facebook friends (people they
never saw or talked to by phone), doing important things like comparing sock
color. I was bothered that people I liked spent so much time doing online
debates with acquaintances or friends of friends rather than connecting with true,
living, breathing people they knew. I felt dumped for Facebook!)
As much as I’d love to be in touch with people I
knew from other chapters of my life, it does get harder with each passing year.
Maybe it’s the phase I’m in, because my kids are in elementary school. I’m
still arranging play dates and I know who their classmates are. My time is
spent helping them form connections. This will be different when they are in
high school. For now, my time is closely bound to their world. I can’t cram 20
phone calls and 80 emails into the hours when they are in school. So I must
pick and choose.
This discussion can end here if you like. I’ve
made all the points I wanted to make. I find this stuff fascinating. I’m always
curious about what we do and why. If you’re interested in more about Dunbar’s
Number, check him out on Wikipedia or read here:
(from Wikipedia.org:)
“Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the
number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an
individual knows who each
person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents
assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive
rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been
proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150…Dunbar's
number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin
Dunbar, who theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that
this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical
processing capacity.
|
In a 1992 article, Dunbar used (neocortex size in) non-human primates to
predict a social group size for humans. Dunbar formed his predictions about
human tribe size using average neocortex size that developed approximately 250,000
years ago, during the Pleistocene age…Dunbar searched
the anthropological and ethnographical literature for
census-like group size information for various hunter–gatherer societies, the
closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene
societies.
Dunbar's surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to
approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village;
150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on
the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialization; 150 as the basic
unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern
times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.
Dunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for
communities with a very high incentive to remain together. For a group of this
size to remain cohesive, Dunbar speculated that as much as 42% of the group's
time would have to be devoted to social grooming. Correspondingly, only groups
under intense survival pressure,[citation needed] such as subsistence villages, nomadic tribes, and
historical military groupings, have, on average, achieved
the 150-member mark. Moreover, Dunbar noted that such groups are almost always
physically close: "... we might expect the upper limit on group size to
depend on the degree of social dispersal. In dispersed societies, individuals
will meet less often and will thus be less familiar with each, so group sizes
should be smaller in consequence." Thus, the 150-member group would occur
only because of absolute necessity—due to intense environmental and economic
pressures.
Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, proposes
furthermore that language may have arisen as a "cheap"
means of social grooming, allowing early humans to efficiently maintain social
cohesion. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend
nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive,
cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to
remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy.[6]
Dunbar's number has since become of interest in anthropology, evolutionary psychology,[7] statistics, and business
management. For example, developers of social software are interested in
it, as they need to know the size of social networks their software needs to
take into account; and in the modern military, operational psychologists seek
such data to support or refute policies related to maintaining or improving unit
cohesion and morale.
A recent study has suggested that Dunbar's number is applicable to online social networks as well.[8][9] Whether online
interactions count as stable social relationships is debatable, as virtual
engagements do not stimulate the same biological responses real interactions
do.[10]
Alternative numbers
Anthropologist H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth and associates
have done a variety of field studies in the United States that came up with an
estimated median number of ties as 231.”
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