Dunbar’s number of 150 friends is deconstructed by a recent study conducted at the Stockholm University. According to Dunbar’s number, an individual can maintain up to 150 friends in his social circle. This means that Dunbar says that the human brain caps 150 as the upper limit for his stable social network. But now, a new study says that this number can be more than this. And this is not a very reliable method to calculate the cognitive limit of friends for a human.

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Dunbar’s number of 150 friends– The Base

Dunbar was a British anthropologist and proposed his theory in the 1990s. He established the theory based on a relation between human’s neocortex area of the brain and their social groups. The study found a special place back then, but the recent study states that this method is not a very reliable one. Patrik Lindenfors is an associate professor of zoological ecology at Stockholm University. There were other researchers also who were involved in the study along with Lindenfors. And collectively they iterated Dunbar’s Analyses with modern methods. The results were strikingly different and the numbers that came out were much larger than 150. And there were other sets also where the number was much lower than 150 too, i.e. from varying between 2 and 520. Hence destabilizing the current belief of Dunbar’s number.

What do researchers say?

Andreas Wartel is also a co-author of the study. He quotes, “It is not possible to estimate for humans with any precision using available methods and data.” The researchers also further say that social and cultural inheritance has a huge impact when it comes to deciding this number. Human genes are also an important factor that decides the social behavior of humans and also their social circle.