Vsauce!
Kevin here.
Your Vsauce2 friend.
Your college friend.
The friend of a friend you met at a party, a family reunion, a concert, an online forum
dedicated to Japanese role playing games.
But am I really your…friend?
Probably not.
Why?
Because we don’t like the same music or movies?
Because you wouldn’t invite me to your wedding?
No.
Because your brain is full.
While studying primate social systems, psychologist Robin Dunbar found a correlation between the
size of the neocortex and the size of the average social group.
The larger the neocortex, the larger the group size.
By extrapolating his findings and applying them to humans, he arrived at a cognitive
limit for the amount of complex, mutually affectionate social relationships a person’s
brain can handle.
A research guideline for the number of real friends you can have.
A literal “friend zone.”
Of 150.
Dunbar’s Number.
So… who are all these Facebook friends I’m not actually friends with?
By pooling everyone in your social network into one tub labeled “friends,” Facebook
oversimplifies your relationships.
Your mom, your best friend from high school, and your brother’s former boss you met once
at a company picnic are all incorrectly assigned the same level of intimacy.
Your actual social network would look less like a tub and more like a series of buckets.
High school friends, neighbors, work friends from various jobs, nuclear family, extended
family, online friends, family friends, people you literally don’t know how you became
Facebook friends with.
You know these are separate hubs because mixing them gets awkward, it’s why seating charts
at weddings get complicated.
Your college buddies and your grandma Tilly not only have little in common, but they’re
likely friends with a different…
you.
And the intimacy of these friendships occur roughly in concentric circles separated by
a factor of three.
You probably have about 5 of your closest friends formally referred to as your support
clique, people you speak with every week.
In fact, 80% of phone calls are made to the same 4 people.
About 12-15 can make up your sympathy group -- people who would be devastated if you died.
You can probably handle about 50 meaningful relationships and a maximum of 150 currently
active friendships.
Here’s the weird part.
Dunbar calculated this human friendship limit based on neocortex size in relation to primate
group size.
It turns out it’s like the shadowy secret of human cooperation.
Oooooh!
No, really.
A study of the twenty tribal societies with available census data showed a mean clan group
size of 153.
Dunbar and fellow evolutionary anthropologist Russell Hill examined the exchange of Christmas
cards in the U.K. and found a maximum network size of 153.5.
A 2008 survey by The Knot Wedding Network of over 18,000 brides revealed an average
wedding guest total of 148.
The Roman army during the Republic utilized a fighting unit called the maniple with 130
to 140 soldiers and officers, while in modern militaries a company tops out at about 150.
Middle Eastern Neolithic villages dating back to 6,000 BC usually populated between 120
to 150, while the Domesday Book of 1086, one of the oldest population surveys, commissioned
by King William The Conqueror for tax collecting purposes reveals an estimated English village
size around 150.
Even into the 18th century the average English village had about 160 residents.
Today, the Hutterite and Amish communities split if the group exceeds 150.
Bill Gore split his Gore-Tex factories by 150 to keep his employees functioning in personal,
cooperative relationships.
A 2011 study of 1.7 million Twitter users found they maintain a stable relationship
with 100-200 individuals.
The average number of Facebook friends is between 150 and 200.
When an NFL team wins the Super Bowl, guess how many rings are awarded?
150.
Wait, so if every person outside my 150 is just some sort of casual acquaintance, then
what's a friend?
And why do we have them?
And do we need them?
And well, that's enough questions for no, Billy.
Just relax.
Relationship quality and the cognitive complexity involved in managing friendships means it’s
not just memorizing human trivia like how one person relates to another and how they
both relate to you, that Judy’s favorite food is beef stroganoff, or the latest gossip
about Stan dumping Sarah for Sally because Sarah snuck out with Steve Sassleberry on
Saturday and they smooched!
A friend requires the presence of a social bond like routinely removing ticks.
The purpose of mutual grooming in primates is not just about picking parasites, but also
about reducing stress and forming and maintaining social structure.
Not for fun, for survival.
The social intelligence hypothesis states that the need for understanding and managing
relationships is the key identifier separating primates from other animals.
And there’s a correlation between group size, complex social worlds, and relative
size of the neocortex, the layer of the brain responsible for cognition and language.
The need to live in larger groups for the survival of the species may have driven humans
to develop the largest relative neocortex on the planet.
I’m able to form words and communicate with you.
You clicked on this video to watch and listen to me.
Our brains evolved to satisfy our need to survive, which required forming relationships
with each other.
Look, if we’re gonna live on the ground, in open habitats, and there are snakes, lions
and dingoes out there, we better have each other’s backs.
And probably a pointy stick or something.
But the internet has made practically the entire world our social habitat.
So how do we categorize, sort, build and maintain relationships with everyone we’ve ever met
-- and everyone we’re ever going to meet?
Social media has allowed us to expand our access to casual relationships and to build
our network of loosely-known acquaintances.
But analysis of Facebook friend surveys showed the inner layers of an individual’s online
social network just reflects the size of it offline.
The internet isn’t allowing us to pass the limit of Dunbar’s Number.
Friendship requires an ongoing mutual connection -- it’s not just a voyeuristic one-way relationship
with your favorite YouTuber even though you feel like you know everything about them.
Phil DeFranco isn’t going to pick you up from the airport at 3 o’clock in the morning.
What?
I'd totally pick you up from the airport.
Wait, really?
No.
Oh.
It’s important to note that the specific 150 number is not a hard and fast cut off,
but a guideline for the cognitive abilities required to track individual traits and preferences
in complex social relationships.
Some people may have a limit of 100 while others can maintain up to 250 active friendships.
And Dunbar’s Number is not a suggestion for how many total friends you should have.
You could have two and that’s totally fine - you just can’t have more than your limit.
It’s not just some memory barrier, a Jeopardy champion can’t magically juggle 900 affectionate
relationships, it’s also about the time required to invest in a friendship to maintain
an emotional interpersonal link.
We have a fixed amount of emotional capital we can spread out among a bunch of people
or to invest more heavily into a smaller amount.
And the time needed to keep relationships going is what can turn an old best friend
into just somebody that you used to know.
Like that song.
Somebody that I used to know.
What’s changed about living in a time where you can have 5,000 Facebook friends isn’t
the number of people you can be friends with, it’s the number of people who could be your
friend.
By opening up communication to the world, we put life preservers on real friendships
of the past as we swim deeper into a sea of people we’d never have been able to meet
before.
And it’s changing how we do…
”I do.”
Marriage was typically a social or economic union arranged or sanctioned by families to
bolster their survival.
According to historian Stephanie Coontz, for thousands of years marriage had very little
to do with the individual relationship between the bride and groom -- it was really a way
of turning strangers into relatives.
A way of sticking new people to your social web.
Of integrating new balls into your ballpit.
Today in the U.S., a third of marriages start online.
I’m sure many of you have close friends you only know from a distance.
By breaking down barriers of time and space, we’ve unlocked meaningful connections unparalleled
in human history.
For thousands of years we were tethered to and maybe even evolved to maintain relationships
with the roughly 150 people we happened to be born around and the families we married
into.
You were born in that social ball pit.
Now there over 3 billion people connected to the internet ready and waiting for a place
in your life.
A spot in your 150.
Which doesn’t seem like much.
Does it?
Until you realize how amazing it is to share your banana with a stranger.
While chimpanzees will kill chimps outside their social groups for resources, a Duke
University study found that bonobos will share food with strangers in order to expand their
social network.
Bats, dolphins, elephants and many primates share with members of their own group, but
the bonobo is offering up banana slices to total strangers over members of their in-group
in the hopes of making a friend.
The human propensity to share has long baffled us from an evolutionary perspective.
Why give your banana to a stranger?
But it now seems at least one other species has seen the survival benefit in finding new
friends.
Anyone who’s faced personal hardship knows how life-saving those friends can be.
There’s a sentiment regarding friendship that’s been passed down for millennia, from
Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus to 19th century British literary critic John Churton
Colllins: “In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.”
And whether you have two, ten or 150, those friends you know when facing adversity, when
things aren’t going well, are forged with a bond so rare, it’s millions of years in
the making.
Want a banana?
And as always - thanks for watching.
So at the end of my video on the Invention Of Blue I featured an animated gif from the
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So check out what Skillshare has to teach you out check out this playlist for more Vsauce2
so you can keep learning about being...
human.