Dunbar’s Number: Why Your Brain Caps Your Social Circle at 150 People

Core Concept: In the age of thousands of social media followers, this episode explores the cognitive limit to human relationships. Anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar found that the size of our neocortex limits us to maintaining about 150 stable social relationships. Going beyond this number stretches our emotional and cognitive resources too thin.Original Citation: Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.Acharjee, S., & Oza, A. (2024). Stability in social networks. Royal Society Open Science, 11(4). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231500 Cited by: 1Acharjee, S., & Panicker, A. T. (2023). Trust levels in social networks. Heliyon, 9(10), e19850. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19850 Cited by: 9Lindenfors, P., Wartel, A., & Lind, J. (2021). ‘Dunbar's number’ deconstructed. Biology Letters, 17(5). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158 Cited by: 112Von Der Heide, R., Vyas, G., & Olson, I. R. (2014). The social network-network: size is predicted by brain structure and function in the amygdala and paralimbic regions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(12), 1962-1972. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsu009 Cited by: 166West, B. J., Massari, G. F., Culbreth, G., Failla, R., Bologna, M., Dunbar, R. I. M., & Grigolini, P. (2020). Relating size and functionality in human social networks through complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(31), 18355-18358. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006875117 Cited by: 88