Dunbar's number

You need between 100 and 150 people to k-keep a community going at a level where you're gonna have security, food systems, water systems that are gonna actually sustain and keep a, keep a family, an extended family alive.

That also happens to be the Dunbar number.

You know, many of you would be familiar with the Dunbar number.

The Dunbar number is the number of people that we can kind of keep in our orbit.

You can keep track of, yeah.

Right? It's also, I found out the other day, um, from doing a, a presentation to Meg Wheatley's-

Please do

... start pr- start approaching Dunbar's number, and I mean, you can have your own finance.

You can have your own banking.

Yes.

And this is why that laptop job is so important, right? 'Cause then you can have that, you know, that source of capital from outside that comes in, in substantial numbers, to circulate internally.

And once that money comes in, it shouldn't go back out again.

So is the HVAC guy gonna make as much as the laptop guy? Probably not, but what he can do is he can do all the HVAC for all the different guys who are working the laptop jobs, and he can make a decent living, you know, maybe doing HVAC, and then maybe a little plumbing or what have you, within this, you know, Dunbar's Number community.

And maybe there's a guy who's the farmer who has, you know, 20 head of cattle, and every year, you know, like, everyone just gets their cattle from that guy.

Don't, you know, stay in line to sort of discourage that sort of behavior.

Anyway, all that for that first half of this episode to say There's a guy named Robin Dunbar, I think he was an archaeologist or anthropologist in the 90s, came up with what was now commonly referred to as Dunbar's number that said after a village size or like a city state, if you will, or civilization or town size of 150 individuals, mechanisms like shame and shutting for regulating behavior broke down because you could no longer know everybody.

There was anonymity.

People, you know, supposedly, supposedly this is how Dunbar and others think this works, is that if we think we can get away with something, then we'll do it.

Government and other societal structures, villages, you know, you think about like a family, an individual, a family, a group, a tribe, a clan.

You know, as you get sort of increasingly larger and add more members, it gets more complicated.

But as we moved from these groupings of 50 to 150 into like the 1,000, 10,000 range, I think we, our ancestors, knew Dunbar's number was going to take effect.

And therefore we had to develop these sort of constructs, these systems like governments, like democracies or whatever to compensate.

Oh, yeah.

Have you ever heard of Dunbar's number?

Yeah, 149.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is something we never talk about in evangelism.

We always want people to go out and evangelize the world, but the, the reality is if you think, if Dunbar's number's real-

Right

Dr. Robert Dunbar from Oxford University is best known for his exploration of human relationships, and specifically the kind of limits and layers of relationships we have.

His work is often summarized as Dunbar's Number because he argued that our relationships can be categorized by group size and a depth of vulnerability or intimacy with each group.

And he argued that our closest, most intimate friends and relationships, the very s- closest inner circle of our lives, are typically one to five people max, people that you can share deeply, vulnerably with.

The next circle would be our close friends, people who you kind of share life with more broadly.

That's just the world we live in.

You can belong to a, a church community at large and not be known at all.

Interestingly enough, the researcher Jeffrey Hall from the University of Kansas did a study in 2018 based on Dunbar's numbers and his circles of friends that he titled, and I love...

This is an academic, um, research paper called How Many Hours Does It Take to Make a Friend? [laughs] He wanted to know, given these circles of relationships, how do we move into these smaller circles? What does it take, what does it require to get closer and closer? And here's what he found.