Can each of us have a maximum of 150 friends? Here is the denial of Dunbar's number

According to a theory from the early 1990s, which is mainly based on brain volume, a person can have up to 150 friends at the same time. That's why it's an idea with little foundation

(Photo: Pixabay) We manage to have a maximum of 150 friends at the same time. This is what the theory called Dunbar's number affirms, according to which each of us would be able to maintain on average only about 150 stable social relationships. To question the science behind this theory, proposed by anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar in the early 1990s and based fundamentally on the size of the primate brain, today were researchers from the University of Stockholm, Sweden, according to which Dunbar's famous number would not return at all. Their new study has just been published in the journal Biology Letters.

Dunbar's issue, we specify, is based on the idea that the volume of the primate neocortex affects the amount of friends you can have. As Dunbar himself wrote, "it is suggested that the number of neocortical neurons limits the organism's ability to process information and that this in turn limits the number of relationships that an individual can maintain simultaneously". When the size of a group exceeds this threshold, adds the expert, it becomes unstable and begins to fragment.

But that the size of the neocortex is actually a constraint to decipher human socialization, the researchers of the new study are not at all convinced. “The theoretical basis of the Dunbar number is not solid,” comments Patrik Lindenfors, one of the authors of the study. "The brains of other primates don't handle information exactly the way the human brain does, and sociability can be explained by factors other than the brain." In their study, the researchers conducted the same analyzes as Dunbar using more modern statistical methods and more up-to-date data to focus on the relationship between social group size and the size of the primate neocortex. From their calculations it emerged that in reality the average maximum limit of social relationships is much smaller than 150 friends (around 42), but with enormous statistical uncertainty. "The 95% confidence interval is too large to allow a number to be accurately indicated, as Dunbar did," the researcher points out.

Researchers say, in conclusion, try to calculate an average number of stable social relationships for any individual on the basis of the volume of the brain is completely reductive, as there are a myriad of factors to come into play in human socialization. "Specifying any number is useless," the researchers write in their study. Most of the research on the social evolution of primates, in fact, is based on socio-ecological factors, and not on calculations dependent on the volume of the brain. "Ecological research on primate sociality, the uniqueness of human thought and empirical observations indicate that there is no cognitive limit to human sociality", concludes the team.


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