Dunbar’s Number: Who Do You Care About?
Dunbar’s Number is definitely one of my all-time favorite concepts in Psychology. It’s basically an idea that says a person can only know so many people before they stop really knowing people. In other words, how many best friends can you really have before they all start fading into just friends, acquaintances, strangers.
Anthropoligist Robin Dunbar had several estimates as to exactly how many people a person could really care about, but most of them were pretty rough. According to Dunbar, you can only really care about 150 people before you stop seeing them as actual people. Again, this is kind of a hard to imagine, but picture this: You hear on the news that a massive earthquake on the other side of the globe has killed thousands of people. An hour later, you receive word that the last person you spent the day with has died in a car accident. Which of these tragedies has more of an effect on you?
If it was the car accident, Dunbar was on to something. Why is it that the death of one person could upset you more than the death of thousands? Because as much as we’d like to think that we care about everyone, we really can’t. As the infamous Josef Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic…”
According to Dunbar, the person you imagined in the car crash scenario was a part of a very special group in your head called the Monkey Sphere. The Monkey Sphere - with the name coming from an experiment involving primates - includes all of the people you really care about. Parents, friends, teachers, co-workers. Up to around 150 of them depending how well your long-term memory is. Anyone outside of this Monkey Sphere isn’t really a person to you.
