INTERVIEW: The Social Brain with Robin Dunbar
Issue 70: We interview Robin Dunbar about his new book on the psychology of successful groups
This week, we share a short interview with Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford who started his career studying the social relationships of wild monkeys and antelope in Africa. He is perhaps most famous for his concept of the Social Brain hypothesis or "Dunbar's number," which suggests that humans have a cognitive limit to the number of social relationships we can maintain at once.
He observed a correlation between the brain size of different primates and the size of the groups in which they live. By taking the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of other primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 stable relationships. He has explained it as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.
Jay met Robin almost exactly a decade ago—on April 22, 2013—at a Social Neuroscience meeting in Paris. It wasn’t a…
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