By Ari Rojas
Art by Shena Han
“We do a lot of things every day that we did not do a 1,000 years ago, get over it!”
— [Redacted]
[Redacted] said this to me last fall, back when drinking with near-strangers seemed like a good idea for whatever reason. Cheez-It crumbs layered the floor where tipsy snackers had missed their mark. This was my audience. I had just gone on a tirade about the significance of Dunbar’s number and how the way we socialized was a drastic departure from all of human history up until now. Perhaps this was not the time nor the place to ask questions of such magnitude, but I couldn’t help myself. Mid-sentence, [Redacted] cut in to say something very similar to the quote above. I have been thinking about that moment ever since. Is [Redacted] right? Should we all take on a “come what may” attitude toward technology because change is inevitable anyway?
Let’s start at the beginning of my Luddite-esque spiral: Dunbar’s number. Nearly three decades ago, British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, along with Professor Susanne Shultz at Manchester University introduced a theory linking the size of the brain mass of mammals to the size of their social groups.[1] Prior to their work, evolutionary encephalization was believed to be the result of brain mass increasing relative to body mass in mammals.[2] Drawing on this allometric relationship, which explains the characteristics of mammals through their body mass, contemporary evolutionary encephalization failed to recognize the potential role that sociality played in brain mass development. Because the body mass of a mammal is subject to ecological pressures, it is difficult to discern the causes of differences in functional cognitive differences solely by looking at body mass relative to brain size.[3] Together, Dunbar and Shultz brought into question accepted beliefs about the evolution of the mammalian brain and sparked an interest in the study of primate sociality and brain mass. In their 2010 study, the two concluded that increased brain mass was “associated with some aspect of bonded sociality.”[4]
Further, Dunbar looked at primates’ neocortex, which is responsible for the brain’s conscious thought, and the size of the groups they lived in.[5] He then transferred this line of work over to humans, which are also primates, and argued that, in general, humans have a social network of 150 people. This is known as the social brain hypothesis.[6]
Unless you are a middle schooler with your first Instagram account, odds are you probably have a follower count at least four times greater than Dunbar’s number. Now, I know what you are thinking: “I don’t have to know all my followers personally, which means some of them don’t count as my social network.” My rebuttal to that is another series of questions:
What is the point of sharing things online with profiles if we can’t maintain a relationship offline?
Why do we “subscribe” to another person’s life and hit follow after only meeting in passing?
Doesn’t this state of hyperconnectivity exhaust our social bandwidth?
To be clear, I am not implying that social relationships today are any less valuable than at any other time in history. I am just curious about where these tangential social relationships fit into Dunbar’s number. Moreover, I want to understand more about women’s relationship to social media. Truthfully, I have more questions than answers on the topic.
Lex Fridman, the host of my favorite podcast, The Lex Fridman Show, interviewed an evolutionary psychologist named David Buss about mating patterns. In the episode, Buss described a phenomenon in which humans naturally compare themselves to those in their immediate living groups as a mating habit. Throughout human evolution, this characteristic has benefited humans to find suitable mates.[7] As the Facebook files have shown, this trait might not be so optimal today. According to the Wall Street Journal, internal messages from Facebook researchers read that young women compare themselves on Instagram, which changes how young women “view and describe themselves.”[8]
While it might make sense to compare oneself to others in a small hunting band for mating purposes, it certainly does not make sense to compare oneself to every woman on the whole wide internet. This is exactly what is happening today. We have not evolved any defenses for the world we live in today. So should we simply get over it because it’s inevitable anyways, or take ourselves off the internet entirely?
In recent years, researchers at Stockholm University have disputed Dunbar’s number to argue that humans can maintain more than 150 social relationships.[9] Amending to the original dataset and taking a “more modern” statistical approach, their study argues that diet is a better predictor of neocortex size in primates as opposed to social groups, as posited by Dunbar. Angela Lee, a professor at Columbia Business School, said that social media along with sites like LinkedIn have revolutionized the way we communicate, thus making Dunbar’s number obsolete in the context of human social interactions.[10]
So is Dunbar’s number scientifically inaccurate or simply obsolete?
Truthfully, I think [Redacted] is right. Luddites need to get over it. Social media is a Pandora’s box and there’s no going back. That’s not to say I think social media is a force of evil or anything of the like; it’s just that it holds the potential to do both immense harm and good, particularly for women.
My solution is simple. Stop maintaining relationships with people who are tangential to your life. This is not an anti-social act. In fact, it’s an act of revolutionary sociality. In other words, to preserve and nurture a few dozen relationships is far more meaningful than superficial, exclusively online relationships. Through narrowing our social circle, we eschew the natural urge to compare ourselves to what we see on our screens.
Like many preteen girls across this country, I was 12 years old when I got my copy of The Care and Keeping of You, which was essentially a manual for how to go through puberty from the American Girl franchise. One page regarding this urge to compare ourselves really stuck with me. The page advised not to compare ourselves to models in beauty magazines (the book was pretty dated; I got it at a garage sale!). Instead, it told young women to look at the bodies of the women around them and in their lives. The bodies of their friend’s mothers, of their female teachers, and of their grandmothers. All of these women are real. They’re not some airbrushed image or photoshopped warped horror. This is what real women look like, and this is what preteen girls will one day grow up to look like. I’m not above comparing myself to what I see on my phone screen, but I do my best to fight it. I don’t follow influencers, and I do my best to avoid them. I’d suggest everyone take the American Girl advice and take a closer, loving look at the women in their lives and spend less time obsessing over social media influencers. I’m not saying it will be easy, but it’s not impossible either.
Today, I keep a smaller Instagram account with nine of my closest friends and those friends keep similar microscopic accounts themselves too. Being scattered across the country for college makes connecting difficult, but we are able to maintain these friendships through concentrating our social bandwidth on those few relationships.
In the end, Dunbar’s number doesn’t really matter, and it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a funny anecdote to explain why you’ve only got about a dozen friends. I encourage you to do a little spring cleaning on your social media accounts and see who you really connect with in your day-to-day life. You might be surprised with who you’re left with and who you remove. After all, your neocortex is only so big; you can’t be expected to keep tabs on more than 150 people at a time.
[1] Shultz, Susanne, and Robin Dunbar, “Encephalization is not a universal macroevolutionary phenomenon in mammals but is associated with sociality.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 107,50 (2010): 21582–6. doi:10.1073/pnas.1005246107
[2] Shultz and Dunbar, “Encephalization.”
[3] Shultz and Dunbar, “Encephalization.”
[4] Shults and Dunbar, “Encephalization.”
[5] R.I.M. Dunbar, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,” Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 22, Issue 6,1992,Pages 469–493, ISSN 0047-2484, https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J.
[6] Dunbar, “Neocortex size.”
[7] Fridman, Lex. “David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Difference .” Spotify, 4 May 2022.
[8] Wells, Georgia, et al. “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 14 Sept. 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739.
[9] Lind , Johan, and Patrik Lindenfors . “Why We Dispute 'Dunbar's Number' — the Claim Humans Can Only Maintain 150 Friendships.” The Conversation, 23 June 2021, https://theconversation.com/why-we-dispute-dunbars-number-the-claim-humans-can-only-maintain-150-friendships-161944.
[10] Gross, Jenny. “Can You Have More than 150 Friends?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/science/dunbars-number-debunked.html#:~:text=LONDON%20%E2%80%94%20Just%20how%20many%20friends,became%20known%20as%20Dunbar%27s%20number.