3 Matching Annotations
- Mar 2023
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But 150 alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Other numbers are nested within the social brain hypothesis too. According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.
- Paraphrase
- 150 alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
- Other range numbers are nested within the social brain hypothesis.
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curiously, Dunbar recognized they were all multiples of 5.
- the tightest circle has just 5 people (loved ones).
- 15 (good friends),
- 50 (friends),
- 150 (meaningful contacts),
- 500 (acquaintances) and
- 1500 (people you can recognise).
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People migrate in and out of these layers,
- but that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.
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to avoid alienation or tensions, city residents should find quasi-villages within their cities.
- Applying Dunbar's number to urban planning gives us the idea of the = "quasi-village"
- Comment
- this could be quite useful for creating more = citizen social capital within cities,
- and from that, more impactful, bottom-up civic engagement
- for climate change action, this could be a Very key strategy
- Claim
- alienation is rife in many large cities and "communities" are:
- no longer communities in the traditional anthropological sense in which social capital was high.
- hence, there is an urgent need for:
- Quotable phrase
- communities need to relearn how to be communities once again.
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- Jan 2022
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royalsocietypublishing.org royalsocietypublishing.org
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Also, researchers have disputed the empirical observation of mean human group sizes approximately averaging around 150 persons, presenting empirical observations of group sizes indicating a wide variety of other numbers [46–53]. Thus, ecological research on primate sociality, the uniqueness of human thinking and empirical observations all indicate that there is no hard cognitive limit on human sociality. Our reanalysis provides the last piece of evidence needed to disregard Dunbar's number.
Even if Dunbar's number is disproved, the range of social network sizes seem to all be less than some upper bound, such as 1,000. This is aligned to common sense - we simply cannot invest meaningful time to maintain more than a group size of even 1,000.
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