Bill Gore first started his company—which makes, among other things, the waterproof, breathable GORE-TEX fabric—in his backyard. The company grew and expanded, and one day Gore walked into his factory and realized that the previously tight-knit small business was no more and he no longer knew his employees. Work quality was suffering and things weren’t running as smoothly.
Through trial and error, Gore discovered that 150 seemed to be the magic number. With 150 employees, people knew each other. They knew the supervisor, the receptionist, the head of shipping, etc. Everything worked so well at that number that once a facility reached 150 employees, Gore would build a new factory. Each factory was designed with 150 parking stalls. Once they were full, it was time for a new one.
University of Oxford anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar knows about the number 150. In fact, he has been credited with first discovering its significance when studying the relationship between brain size and group size in animals. The theory was that the size of the neocortex could predict the group size for animals. Dunbar decided to apply the math to humans and found that someone with an average human brain would be predicted to have a social group of 150. And as Dunbar looked at everything from military groups to Amish social circles, he found evidence of this 150 social group size appearing again and again.
In the 20 years since Dunbar first discovered the relevance of 150, he has been examining it in every possible scenario, including the evolving social media scene of recent years. As Facebook has become more and more popular (70 percent of computer users have a Facebook page, reports Margaret Felice in this issue [p. 40]), many have significantly more “friends” than 150. Social media certainly make it feel easier to keep in touch with more people.
Additional research, however, shows that even those users who have many more than 150 friends really interact with only—yes, you guessed it—150 of those friends.
The Dunbar Number, as it has been coined in recent years, really breaks down into four subsets. People can have 150 casual friends and within that group, 50 close friends. Within that group are 15 people that they would turn to for sympathy and confide in. And then there are the five very closest people, often made up of family members.
Maintaining relationships takes time and we only have so much social capital to go around. Traditionally, we have spent 60 percent of that capital on the groups closest to us—the 50, 15, and 5—and spent 40 percent on our larger circles. But as social media expands that larger circle to 300 and 400 and more—and we spend our time “liking,” commenting, and trying to keep up on details of a much larger group—we have less capital to spend on those closer associations. Social media are reversing the 60/40 rule, as we spend more time on a broader, more superficial base.
Then there are those elements of social interaction that virtual connections can never provide—namely, physical touch. That’s what started Dunbar’s research in the first place—he wanted to know why certain animals spent so much time grooming. His research has continued to study the critical element of physical touch and has shown that without it, meaningful, lasting connections just don’t happen. Social media denies us that.
A singer’s career is dependent on social networks. As our social networks grow, whether through social media or direct personal contact, we must ask ourselves how meaningful those connections are. Is “more” better or are we actually devaluing our network as we increase its raw numbers without discretion? Have we focused too much on virtual connections at the expense of valuable face-to-face, physical interactions?
Like Gore, we must each assess our parking lot and evaluate not only how many “cars” it can hold, but also what drivers we will let park there to ensure we have the time and resources to maintain meaningful relationships within our social circles.
