Dunbar

Dunbar (pronounced duhn-bahr)

(1) A proper noun (given and surnames, town & locality names et al).

(2) As Dunbar's number, a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships (those in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person).

Pre 1100: From a Boernician family in ancient Scotland who are the ancestors of those who first used the name Dunbar. They lived in the barony of Dunbar on the North Sea coast near Edinburgh. The construct of the place name is from the Gaelic dùn (a fort) + barr (top; summit).  The surname Dunbar was created by the eleventh century barony of Dunbar in the Lothians, created when Cospatrick fled to Scotland after being deprived of his Earldom of Northumberland by William the Conqueror.

Dunbar’s Number

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar (b 1947) explored the idea there might be a relationship between brain size and social group size through his studies of non-human primates.  This ratio was mapped using neuroimaging and the observation of time devoted to important social behaviour among primates.  Dunbar concluded that the size (relative to body mass) of the neocortex (the part of the brain associated with cognition and language) is linked to the size of a cohesive social group.  This ratio is a measure of the complexity a social system can handle.

Using this mathematical model, Dunbar applied the principle to humans, examining historical, anthropological and contemporary psychological data about group sizes, including how big groups get before they fragment, split off or collapse, finding a remarkable consistency around the number one-hundred and fifty (150).  The 150 number appears to apply to early hunter-gatherer societies and an array of more modern formations: offices, communes, factories, residential campsites, military organisations, medieval English villages and even Christmas card lists.  Where the number exceeds 150, network cohesion reduces.

Others have done research in this area and their theories tend to suggest the tightest circle has just 5 (loved ones) followed by successive layers of 15 (close friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (those you can recognise).  People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.  Dunbar offered no suggestion why these layers exist in multiples of five, but noted it did seem fundamental to monkeys and apes and most research indicated this was replicated in human relationships.  Dunbar’s 150 number is contested within the discipline although most in the field concur there probably is a Dunbarian number.  However, reducing it to a mean value may not be a helpful model of social interaction because connections aren’t normally distributed (shaped like a bell curve), a few people with massive or tiny numbers of contacts tending to distort the result.  There are also critiques on methodological grounds. Primates’ brain sizes are influenced by other aspects besides social complexity and social capacity can be stretched in different cultural settings, especially with the advent of newer technologies.

There are friends and there are followers and there is no such thing as a Dunbar number for followers; one can certainly suffer a surplus of "friends" but one can never have too many "followers".

People had friends before there was Facebook but the platform’s use of “friends” as the original prime identifier of a linkage with another did annoy those who thought “acquaintances” should have been offered as an alternative and had Facebook’s founders known what was to come, they might have done things a little differently.  However, because of Facebook’s origins as a parochial system peculiar to a single educational institution, the use of “friend” at the time certainly reflected the purpose and the approach was little difference to the other embryonic social media platforms early in the twenty-first century.  Once deconstructed, the structural similarities between Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, hi5 and MySpace were quite striking but Facebook flourished and the others did not.  There were many reasons for this but Facebook certainly benefited from learning from the mistakes of those who came first and their product offered a better experience for users who clearly preferred ease of navigation and simplicity of use compared to extensive (and not always intuitive) configurability.  Having a large group of Harvard University students as a beta test group proved invaluable and unlike others, what Facebook had from day one of its general release was a product which was inherently global and scalable.

Had the evolution of the socials been predictable, Facebook might well from the start have had “customers” and “acquaintances” as well as “friends” and it probably would also have allowed the addition of “followers”, now one of the core measures in the ecosystem.  The difference between “friends” and “followers” is that friends are presumed to enjoy a mutual connection and the establishment of the relationship needs mutual consent while followers may attach themselves of their own volition; friends are thus symmetrical, followers inherently an asymmetric concept although it’s known many Facebook accounts have friend counts which suggest the user is accumulating them essentially as followers.

“Friend” has before been used in novel (frankly Orwellian) ways.  The head of the Nazi SS (the Schutzstaffel (protection squad), a paramilitary formation which became an economic empire and in wartime eventually morphed into a parallel army close to a million-strong), Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945; Reichsführer SS 1929-1945), also coordinated an interesting aggregation of individuals and institutions styled the Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS (Circle of Friends of the Reichsführer SS (FRFSS)).  The origins of the FRFSS lay in the Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft (Circle of Friends of the Economy), a kind of combination of think tank and slush fund, the money provided by those in industry or the finance sector who either wished to support the party or anticipated them gaining power and wished to be on the winning side.  Himmler’s power grew during the 1930s but many of his grand designs (a good number of them crackpot schemes) hadn’t proceeded beyond the planning stage because of a lack of funds, the resources of the state directed primarily towards re-armament.  In re-constituting the Circle of Friends of the Economy as the FRFSS, funds became available on the basis of mutual interest, Himmler as the coordinator of repression in the Nazi state able to use the SS to deliver cheap labor (mostly from concentration camps) in exchange for the money and technical assistance he needed to build the economic enterprises he intended to create to make the SS independent of the state.  In this hunt he faced some competition from others, notably Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Hitler's designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945) who led an expensive lifestyle as well as needing money for his industrial empire.  Himmler’s Dunbar number has never been certain but it’s believed the number of friends in the FRFSS never exceeded a few dozen.