Dunbar Number

Dunbar Number = the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, and therefore, a limit to viable groups.

See the related entry on the Power Law.

Background

From the Life with Alacrity blog:

"Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes:

... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, 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 is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.

Dunbar supports this hypothesis through studies by a number of field anthropologists. These studies measure the group size of a variety of different primates; Dunbar then correlate those group sizes to the brain sizes of the primates to produce a mathematical formula for how the two correspond. Using his formula, which is based on 36 primates, he predicts that 147.8 is the "mean group size" for humans, which matches census data on various village and tribe sizes in many cultures." (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html)

More Information

Dunbar's original essay is at http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/05/65/bbs00000565-00/bbs.dunbar.html