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If you have become a curmudgeon like Pickerhead, you can relate to the Dunbar Number which claims we can only know well 150 people. Bloomberg/Business Week with the story.
A little more than 10 years ago, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar began a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the English. This was in the days before online social networks made friends and “likes” as countable as miles on an odometer, and Dunbar wanted a proxy for meaningful social connection. He was curious to see not only how many people a person knew, but also how many people he or she cared about. The best way to find those connections, he decided, was to follow holiday cards. After all, sending them is an investment: You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. These are not huge costs, but most people won’t incur them for just anybody.
Working with the anthropologist Russell Hill, Dunbar pieced together the average English household’s network of yuletide cheer. The researchers were able to report, for example, that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The primary finding of the study, however, was a single number: the total population of the households each set of cards went out to. That number was 153.5, or roughly 150.
This was exactly the number that Dunbar expected. Over the past two decades, he and other like-minded researchers have discovered groupings of 150 nearly everywhere they looked. Anthropologists studying the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies have found that clans tend to have 150 members. Throughout Western military history, the size of the company—the smallest autonomous military unit—has hovered around 150. The self-governing communes of the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, always split when they grow larger than 150. So do the offices of W.L. Gore & Associates, the materials firm famous for innovative products such as Gore-Tex and for its radically nonhierarchical management structure. When a branch exceeds 150 employees, the company breaks it in two and builds a new office.
For Dunbar, there’s a simple explanation for this: In the same way that human beings can’t breathe underwater or run the 100-meter dash in 2.5 seconds or see microwaves with the naked eye, most cannot maintain many more than 150 meaningful relationships. Cognitively, we’re just not built for it. As with any human trait, there are outliers in either direction—shut-ins on the one hand, Bill Clinton on the other. But in general, once a group grows larger than 150, its members begin to lose their sense of connection. We live on an increasingly urban, crowded planet, but we have Stone Age social capabilities. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” Dunbar has written. “Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
While Dunbar has long been an influential scholar, today he is enjoying newfound popularity with a particular crowd: the Silicon Valley programmers who build online social networks. At Facebook (FB) and at startups such as Asana and Path, Dunbar’s ideas are regularly invoked in the attempt to replicate and enhance the social dynamics of the face-to-face world. Software engineers and designers are basing their thinking on what has come to be called Dunbar’s Number. Path, a mobile photo-sharing and messaging service founded in 2010, is built explicitly on the theory—it limits its users to 150 friends.
“What Dunbar’s research represents is that no matter how the march of technology goes on, fundamentally we’re all human, and being human has limits,” says Dave Morin, one of Path’s co-founders. …
… Scientists have long been intrigued by the question of why primates have such big brains. It’s nice to be smart, of course, but big brains demand an enormous amount of energy and require years to grow to full size, and the larger skulls that protect them make childbirth much more dangerous. Plenty of species have thrived on this planet without much of a brain at all.
Dunbar’s argument, laid out in the Journal of Human Evolution, was that big brains evolved to solve the problem of social life. Living in large groups confers significant advantages, chief among them better protection against predators. But living together is also difficult. Members compete for food and access to mates. They have to guard against bullies and cheats—and pick their own spots to bully or cheat. “For very social species, and this applies particularly to primates, the group is an adaptation to solve particular ecological problems,” Dunbar explains. “But the group itself triggers a whole series of problems at the individual level. It’s essentially the social contract problem: People tread on your toes; they steal your food just as you’ve unearthed it.”
As group size grows, a dizzying amount of data must be processed. A group of five has a total of 10 bilateral relationships between its members; a group of 20 has 190; a group of 50 has 1,225. Such a social life requires a big neocortex, the layers of neurons on the surface of the brain, where conscious thought takes place. In his 1992 paper, Dunbar plotted the size of the neocortex of each type of primate against the size of the group it lived in: The bigger the neocortex, the larger the group a primate could handle. At the same time, even the smartest primate—us—doesn’t have the processing power to live in an infinitely large group. To come up with a predicted human group size, Dunbar plugged our neocortex ratio into his graph and got 147.8. …
… Dunbar is familiar with the critiques of his work, and he has responses to them. He agrees with Watts, for example, that people have different social networks for different purposes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some basic emotional bond we reserve for some people, independent of their utility to us: “Someone like your boss, or the person you borrow $50 from to pay the drug dealer, these people are meaningful in your life, but they’re not meaningful to you as relationships.” He also continues to find his number popping up all around him. A paper published in 2011 found that on Twitter the average number of other people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200. And though the limit on how many Facebook friends one can have is a generous 5,000, the average user has 190—more than 150, but within what Dunbar sees as the margin of error.
Dunbar himself has zero Facebook friends. He occasionally peers over his wife’s shoulder when she logs on at home, but he isn’t on the social network. He has a LinkedIn (LNKD) account, he says, “by mistake.” He opened a Path account but never uses it.
Dunbar does not rule out the possibility that human beings might be able to reset the cognitive limits on our social lives—we’ve done it before. The reason we’re able to function in so much larger groupings than our primate cousins, Dunbar argues, is because, tens of thousands of years ago, we taught ourselves to talk. Whereas baboons bond by taking turns picking each others’ nits, we have rhetoric and gossip and half-time speeches, not to mention singing and storytelling and jokes, to bring and hold us together. Language, he says, is how humans used their big brains to get to 150. And until something as revolutionary as that comes along, 150 is where he thinks we’ll stay.
Back to the real world where law faculties are still abusing their customers. Michael Graham tells us about the lousy law school where the dean makes $867,000 a year.
From the “Higher Ed Bubble Hits Massachusetts” File…
New England Law, Boston has operated in the shadows of the region’s more prestigious law schools for decades, trailing so far behind in some measures of excellence that US News & World Report does not include the downtown campus in its widely read ranking of 145 better law schools in the nation.
Yet the school’s longtime dean, John F. O’Brien, may be the highest paid law school dean in America, pocketing more than $867,000 a year in salary and benefits, including a “forgivable loan” that he used to buy a Florida condominium.
How does Dean O’Brien bring in all this legal tender? He and New England Law take advantage of the “everybody outta go to college!” attitude.
It is also the story of a law school that has hiked tuition by more than 80 percent in just a few years while doubling the percentage of applicants it accepts, generating the funds for increased student aid but also for the big salaries paid to O’Brien and other top administrators even as the demand for law school graduates dries up.
Higher tuition, taking in lots more customers, all while the market for new attorneys is falling and starting salaries collapsing. …
Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.
Leno: President Obama has announced the theme for his second inauguration. It’s “Faith in America’s Future.” The idea is to get our minds off of America’s present.
Conan: Tickets to President Obama’s inauguration have sold out. At least that’s what the President is telling Joe Biden.
Conan: After 113 days, the National Hockey League has settled its contract dispute. So finally, Americans can get back to not watching hockey.
Letterman: It got so bad during the National Hockey League strike that ‘Disney on Ice’ began to allow fighting.
Fallon: Obama gears up for a fight over the Chuck Hagel Defense nomination, as well as a fight over that other thing–everything else. …