RP388 The Magic Social Number

 RP388 The Magic Social Number

From the earliest point in our evolution, we have been social animals. Living in hunter-gatherer groups, we created small societies based on complex interpersonal relationships and developed a broader collective of ideas dictating the rules of our social world.
Creating and maintaining these bonds requires a skill that sociologists have termed “social action.” These are actions which take into account the reactions of others and can be altered according to these reactions. This cause-and-effect-based behavior results in firm social structures within which individuals can better organize their lives, and set and achieve goals.
During the past 200 years, however, people have gone from living in relatively small rural societies to living in cities filled with millions of people. It is estimated that by 2050, 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities. So how do human beings, who for most of our evolutionary history have lived in small societies, cope with the emergence of these city-centered super societies?
Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, has suggested that there is actually a limit to the number of people we can maintain meaningful social interactions with. Dunbar says that human beings tend to form natural groups of about 150 people. This number is roughly the size of traditional hunter-gatherer tribes, the average size of a medieval village, and the number of friends the average person stays in contact with on Facebook.
Dunbar has divided this number into layers of intimate friends, good friends, friends, and acquaintances. The level of intimacy required between these 150 people is described by Dunbar as "people you wouldn't feel embarrassed about joining if you happened to find them at the bar in the transit lounge of Hong Kong airport at 3 a.m."
In recent years, people's social groups have tended to become stretched over countries or even continents due to job migration, attending universities far from home, and the Internet revolution.
This has led to theorists questioning the concept of community and its future, fearing that as the world grows farther apart, a lack of social interactions may leave us feeling quite alone in a very crowded world.