Michael Simmons at Forbes: “There is a debate happening between software developers and scientists: How large can and should our networks be in this evolving world of social media? The answer to this question has dramatic implications for how we look at our own relationship building…
To better understand our limits, I connected with the famous British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar, creator of his namesake; Dunbar’s number.
Dunbar’s number, 150, is the suggested cognitive limit to the number of relationships we can maintain where both parties are willing to do favors for each other.
Dunbar’s discovery was in finding a very high correlation between the size of a species’ neocortex and the average social group size (see chart to right). The theory predicted 150 for humans, and this number is found throughout human communities over time….
Does Dunbar’s Number Still Apply In Today’s Connected World?
There are two camps when it comes to Dunbar’s number. The first camp is embodied by David Morin, the founder of Path, who built a whole social network predicated on the idea that you cannot have more than 150 friends. Robin Dunbar falls into this camp and even did an academic study on social media’s impact on Dunbar’s number. When I asked for his opinion, he replied:
The 150 limit applies to internet social networking sites just as it does in face-to-face life. Facebook’s own data shows that the average number of friends is 150-250 (within the range of variation in the face-to-face world). Remember that the 150 figure is just the average for the population as a whole. However, those who have more seem to have weaker friendships, suggesting that the amount of social capital is fixed and you can choose to spread it thickly or thinly.
Zvi Band, the founder of Contactually, a rapidly growing, venture-backed, relationship management tool, disagrees with both Morin and Dunbar, “We have the ability as a society to bust through Dunbar’s number. Current software can extend Dunbar’s number by at least 2-3 times.” To understand the power of Contactually and tools like it, we must understand the two paradigms people currently use when keeping in touch: broadcast & one-on-one.
While broadcast email makes it extremely easy to reach lots of people who want to hear from us, it is missing personalization. Personalization is what transforms information diffusion into personal relationship building. To make matters worse, email broadcast open rates have halved in size over the last decade.
On the other end of the spectrum is one-on-one outreach. Research performed by Facebook data scientists shows that one-on-one outreach is extremely effective and explains why:
Both the offering and the receiving of the intimate information increases relationship strength. Providing a partner with personal information expresses trust, encourages reciprocal self-disclosure, and engages the partner in at least some of the details of one’s daily life. Directed communication evokes norms of reciprocity, so may obligate partner to reply. The mere presence of the communication, which is relatively effortful compared to broadcast messages, also signals the importance of the relationship….”
