{"id":300785,"date":"2010-02-10T03:39:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T08:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1752027331714385066.post-7714528717560888645"},"modified":"2010-02-10T03:40:43","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T08:40:43","slug":"150-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/300785","title":{"rendered":"150 Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I am pleased to see this particular item.  It has been long known that in primitive conditions, the extended human village calves at around 200.  Obviously people sort themselves out with a smaller group of say fifty or so heading out to establish a new village.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
This certainly suggested an upper limit to a person\u2019s ability to relate properly to people.  The hard news from this piece is that it is properly 150 without much variation implied here.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Read through this.  I think it will become very useful.  I had already been thinking along these lines and had begun developing a prospective symbolic language to work with it properly.<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
It should be immediately useful to sales training in particular.  We now have a realistic framework to plan with<\/span>.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
British researcher asks: How many friends can you have?<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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The magic number is 150<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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Published On Fri Feb 05 2010<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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Debra Black<\/i><\/span><\/b>Staff Reporter<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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British anthropologist Robin Dunbar says human beings can have no more than 150 friends \u2013 that\u2019s the upper limit the brain can absorb.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
His conclusion comes from studying the social group size of monkeys and apes and how that size might relate to the brain.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Initially <\/i>Dunbar<\/i><\/st1:place> was examining why primates groom each other. If the reason involved sexual bonding, it should correspond to \u201cthe social brain hypothesis\u201d that the reason primates have a large brain is because of their social complexity.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
In other words, you need a large brain to keep track of your relationships. Humans, he says, are no different.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Known as \u201c<\/i>Dunbar<\/i><\/st1:place>\u2019s number,\u201d the idea of an upper limit to friends is bound to cause some people \u2013 especially teens and young adults — to raise their eyebrows, particularly in this era of social network sites where some people boast of having thousands of friends.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Since first coming up with the number 150, Dunbar, who heads the <\/i>Institute<\/i><\/st1:placetype> of <\/i>Cognitive<\/i><\/st1:placename> and Evolutionary Anthropology at <\/i>Oxford<\/i><\/st1:placename> <\/i>University<\/i><\/st1:placetype><\/st1:place>, has also looked at what the nature of the friendship is within that circle. And he found that the people within that circle were those that had a personal relationship based on history and a shared experience \u2013 be it family or friends.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Dunbar<\/i><\/span><\/st1:place>, whose book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? has just been published by Faber & Faber in <\/i>England<\/i><\/st1:country-region><\/st1:place>, describes a person\u2019s friends akin to ripples in a pond \u2013 each ripple representing an ever increasing number of friends from 5 up to 150. Those closest to you are usually family, then close friends and eventually acquaintances.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThe other key thing is the 150 friends aren\u2019t a homogeneous group of people, but rather they are rings of people or circles of friendship that expand outwards.\u201d<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
The first five friends and or family you might be prepared to go to prison for, <\/i>Dunbar<\/i><\/st1:place> said. The next layer of 10? You wouldn\u2019t go to prison for all of them. \u201cYou\u2019re less emotionally engaged with them,\u201d <\/i>Dunbar<\/i><\/st1:place> says. \u201cYou might lend them $100. The next layer out, which takes you to 50, your emotional engagement is less but still there. You might lend them $20. The next layer of 100, you might do them a favour.\u201d<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Everyone outside those 150 are people you may not even have a reciprocal friendship with, he added.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Dunbar<\/i><\/span><\/st1:place> said that once he had determined the upper range of friends, he examined a wide range of historical and contemporary settings to see if the number still applied. And it did \u2013 in everything from villages 100 years ago in which the population hovered around 150 to individuals\u2019 social networking sites. Even the Gore-Tex fabrics factory keeps its employees at 150 at each of its sites, he said.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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Some of <\/i>Dunbar<\/i><\/st1:place>\u2019s work on the magic number 150 is being used in other areas of research, including the development of mobile phones and how much storage is actually needed for people\u2019s address books, as well as building the optimum organizational structure.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Even last year\u2019s international banking crisis might have been averted if the number 150 had been applied, <\/i>Dunbar<\/i><\/st1:place> said. If the banks units had been smaller, everyone might have known what was going on and felt more responsibility towards each other.<\/o:p><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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I am pleased to see this particular item.  It has been long known that in primitive conditions, the extended human village calves at around 200.  Obviously people sort themselves out with a smaller group of say fifty or so heading out to establish a new village. This certainly suggested an upper limit to a person\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}