What is Dunbar's Number and why do we care?
Dunbar's Number is validated every time that we observe crime rates and corruption in large urban area. Cities cram many people into very dense units. Exponential increases in both the frequency and intensity of crime, violence, and more is evident in the cities, just as revealed in Dunbar's studies. Still urban planners continue to strive to pack more people into smaller areas. Dispite the mounting evidence of negative human consequences, the plans put forth by many urban planners, developers, and even the UN are based on the plan to jam 80% of the world’s population into 20% of the land. That plan is known as UN Agenda 2030 (previously known as Agenda 21).
Ignorance to Dunbar’s number and the other correlated theorems will not change the outcome. 200,000 years of historical data prove that Dunbar’s number is a good starting point. The 80/20 plan will yield only one possible outcome, the need for more policing, government regulation, oversight, and controls. The crime, violence, and antisocial behaviors associated with such high-density populations is intense. I am writing an article on my idea of "Mesh Network Societies", stay tuned.
Dunbar’s rule states that when societies/groups exceed 148 members bad things begin to emerge in the social interactions. Violence, sexual perversions, deceit, theft, and much more tear apart the sub-148-member group’s previously peaceful tranquility.
Dunbar’s Number plays an important part in the crafting of cohesive social unit. Understanding the significant causality and effect of Dunbar’s number is the very important. It is the postulated cognitive limit to a person's social circle, the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships.
Perspectives in Leadership and Group / Cohesion Survival
Despite the ubiquitous use of technology, Dunbar’s Number is bolstered by the Allen Curve which demonstrates a massive drop in communication between group members as the distance between them increases. Conversely, if they spend time in the presence of a person they are likely to keep in contact via other means when they are apart, short term.
There are many lessons to be learned for leaders. If you are not a leader, knowing the signs of good leadership and the earmarks of a solid cohesive unit will help you to choose wisely with whom you align yourself for the best survival results.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, first posited his research findings in 1992. He discovered a correlation between primate brain size and the mean average size of their social group. In his paper, "Co-Evolution of Neocortex Size Group Size and Language in Humans”, he hypothesized a predictive mean group size for humans (Dunbar’s Number) at 147.8. Dunbar studied census evidence, spanning from the Pleistocene humans 200,000 + years ago through the present time. His theorem, known as the Dunbar Number, is based upon research studying primate groups, primitive human villages, cultures, and tribes.
The research focused on neocortex size and its relationship to a perceived cognitive limit related to the number of individuals with whom anyone person can maintain stable relationships. While language played a part in the social group and its cohesion, primatologists and sociologists observed some troubling results when the numbers rose over 138. Testing with both non-human primates and humans Dunbar discovered Dunbar's number, a 95% confidence interval of between 100 and 230. Dunbar believed after all his research that the optimum / “sweet spot” predicted “mean” social group number for humans was 148.
Research focused on defining the building blocks of successful social unit cohesion; what makes a group/clan/society survive and succeed as a unit together. Anthropologists, linguists, engineers, technologists, primatologists, sociologists, and many others have tested, studied, and studied the phenomena and always prove out Dunbar’s number. There is a voluminous amount of peer reviewed research supporting Dunbar. We, as did countless researchers, see innumerable examples of this in play all around us.
Dunbar's number has been popularized in countless business and management books around the world. Creative license has popularized Dunbar's number as 150. The number is often referred to as the tipping point.
One of the most intriguing stories that Malcolm Gladwell related in his book; “The Tipping Point” was about the company who manufactures Gore-Tex. The company, in an effort to increase profit and efficiency, discovered through a process of elimination, that Dunbar’s Number was the key to their quest. They broke their workforce up into 150-person groups. Each building housed 150 employees, as they said, “Each time the 150 parking spots were filled, we built another building”. They were highly successful.
Surveys of village and tribe sizes validate that nearly all Neolithic farming villages, Hutterite settlements, and even professional armies in Roman antiquity limited themselves to 150 as the basic unit size. This was not a coincidence.
Check out the article entitled: Perspectives in Leadership and Group / Cohesion Survival the article outlines how the theories and rules below may act as building blocks in the formation of a powerful and successful cohesive unit / society:
- Dunbar's number
- The Allen Curve
- Émile Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society - Mechanical and Organic Society - The Mechanical Society is the best for the people, Organic Society protects the government/society
- Ferdinand Tönnies two conceptual models for types of human association: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.
- Lenski's theories of sociological evolution
- The Hawthorne 1924 studies (extremely important insight)
- Peace Among Primates, read the section regarding natural born killers
- Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin sounded the alarm about the trends of modern materialism
"Co-Evolution of Neocortex Size Group Size and Language in Humans”
