…key is @zeynep on how Dunbar number is popular impt insight, but one that’s been applied too widely w/o understanding what actually means
— sonal chokshi (@smc90)February 22, 2014
Not the Dunbar Constant, but the Boyd Constant
The simplistic reading of the Dunbar Number (often called the Dunbar Constant) is that people are cognitively limited to having only 150 friends.
The more nuanced view is that we have room in our minds for only so much social knowledge about people. Social data — like who dated who in your high school class, what coalitions exist between this group of neighbors on your block, and who trusts who in this department at the office — form networks in our minds, networks that reflect the social networks we encounter in life. These networks can be filled with the social metadata that I mentioned — trust, or connections, or influence — and obviously there are limits to how much we can hold in our memories.
But in the modern world many of us know considerably more than 150 people: we just don’t very much about them compared to the way that villagers in medieval England knew their neighbors and kin. So, I know a little about thousands of people, more about a few hundred, and a whole lot about only a few dozen.
If there is a constant it’s not a fixed number of how many friends you can have, but how much social knowledge your mind can hold. Let’s call it the Boyd Constant.
