In a post a few days ago, I introduced the magic number 150 — also known as Dunbar’s number. I found the text of Dunbar’s original paper, here. I would strongly encourage anyone working in social media to read the article. While many popular authors have quoted Dunbar, the takeaway is usually something to the effect that ‘150 is the magic number.’ That is, that 150 is the maximum group size where a member can know everyone else.
However, Dunbar spends time investigating another variable in the equation — the time we spend engaged in “social grooming.”
A figure of around 20% seems to be an absolute upper limit on the amount of time that primates can afford to devote to social interaction… The group size predicted for modern humans… would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming. (The 95% confidence limits on predicted group size would yield grooming times that range from 28% to 66%.) This is more than double that observed in any population of nonhuman primates. Bearing in mind that this figure refers to the average group size, and that many groups will be substantially larger than this, the implications for human time budgets are clearly catastrophic. A group of 200, for instance, would have to devote 56.6% of its day to social grooming. For any organism that also has to earn a living in the real world, this would place a significant strain on its ability to balance its time budget.
All of a sudden the data on social networking usage makes so much more sense, doesn’t it? I suspect that many parents of teenage children would find such “catastrophic” estimates to be quite accurate. But Dunbar goes on to explain that human language can allow for multi-tasking (speaking while doing other things, like eating) and one to many communication.
Modern humans do, however, possess a form of social communication that overcomes both of these limitations very effectively: not only can speech be combined with almost every other activity (we can forage and talk at the same time), but it can also be used to address several different individuals simultaneously. Thus, language introduces major savings by allowing an individual to do two different things at once. My suggestion, then, is that language evolved as a “cheap” form of social grooming, so enabling the ancestral humans to maintain the cohesion of the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time.
So, it would seem, modern communications technologies like email, instant messaging, social networking, vitality feeds (e.g., Facebook’s News Feed, FriendFeed), Twitter, blog RSS feeds, and mobile phones are taking social grooming to the next level. Either by allowing us to expand our social group size [beyond 150] without a commensurate cost in time spent engaged in social grooming. Or, alternatively, we will be able to maintain our current maximum group size while displacing social grooming time with some other activity.
This has certainly been the case for me. This year more people remembered my birthday than in the past few years combined, thanks to Facebook. Status updates from Facebook and Twitter allow my friends to unobtrusively broadcast updates about their goings-on. FriendFeed and Facebook make sure that my activities on the web are passively syndicated — whether I upload photos on Flickr, add something to my Amazon wish-list, or buy tickets to the latest installment of Indiana Jones on Fandango. In the past few years, these web tools have led to the largest increase in my social productivity since email, IM, and the mobile phone.. combined.
Most people don’t use FriendFeed and Twitter. And most of my activities on and off the web don’t result in vitality events. Just think about how dramatic this change will be once the average consumer embraces the full suite of these products.
So what can we do to take advantage of these trends?
1. Turn passive activities into vitality feeds.
Social productivity will grow geometrically as more people and services join the revolution. A key to getting the masses to engage is to make the creation of these events “auto-magic.” Facebook’s Beacon project was the right idea, it was just poorly executed. What can you do to turn consumer’s passive activities into feeds? Imagine giving consumers control over most of their activities in a passive way — e.g., prompt user on a certain event and ask them if they would like to have the event automatically distributed in the future. Today a tiny fraction of my online and virtually none of my offline activities are easy to share with others.
2. Location, location, location.
GPS will soon be everywhere. I will speak more about this in future posts. But, for now, think about the social efficiency gains to be had by leveraging information about my location. In particular, how can we use a consumer’s GPS data to help them engage in social grooming?
3. Better access controls.
The binary friend or no friend permission system will not scale. Unfortunately, I don’t have a better suggestion as asking users to actively manage complex permissions will not work. We need some type of system that infers optimal permissions (for individuals and groups) based on activity and then allows the user to accept or adjust suggestions.
10 Comments
May 26, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Great Article. Grooming is exactly what it feels like.
I feel like we’re building social lubricant. To draw an analogy to alcohol… A few drinks can make us more conversational, but too many makes us pass out. I’m having a blast on friendfeed with only 30-50 follow[ing|ers]. The first 50-100 friends on facebook is fun. But I can’t keep up with 150+ because I can’t craft correspondence that makes sense to such a diverse crowd. Figuring out how to efficiently create homogeneous groups I think is the next breakthrough needed to scale up these big social networks.
The only scaling I’ve experienced with the big networks are the big-announcements: births, deaths — universally approachable events. I feel that the ‘faddish’ nature of social networks is due impart because after a large growth period, members can’t connect with such a diverse crowd. People need to move on to find a group they can affiliate themselves with.
May 26, 2008 at 2:20 pm
On the extreme flip side this brings to mind the size of our Federal representative’s constituencies, where originally 30,000 was the magic number of citizens thought to be properly served by one member of the House. Now it’s about one in 700,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congressional_apportionment
http://www.thirty-thousand.org
May 26, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Joe,
Thanks for your thoughts. As you note, it’s interesting how useful a social network (with many friends) can be with episodic events like weddings and birthdays. But that for more mundane [and frequent] interactions, I agree that having a smaller group increases quality.
Scott,
Very interesting insight. I look forward to checking out your suggested URLs in more detail.
-Mike
May 27, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Looking forward to your posts on location based services.
There are so many things to still be done in this LBS space. I am looking forward to the day when I can query for nearby price and availability for a particular item I want, order my favorite coffee from the starbuck’s nearest my car, or find a close-by and available parking spot right now.
May 28, 2008 at 11:17 pm
RE: In particular, how can we use a consumer’s GPS data to help them engage in social grooming?
Pretty easily actually. We have an Open API for developers that allows them to write a simple client side app on mobile that reads the GPS. It then makes this information available to the browser which in turn makes it available to any web server.
In one of your previous posts you mentioned that you only need a client side app if you need to get outside the browser security. Well what if you could write a client side app that allowed you to access anything on the device (think mobile here) and then have it available for the browser and specifically for JavaScript (if required).
Now you have real “Where” information - couple that to real time “Who” and “What” information and you have all the critical elements for social grooming.
In fact the very last comment above can easily be done with this approach. We have working demos on everything but the parking lot. Even real time search based on GPS location all inside the browser (ps. it’s cross platform (mobile) as well))
Cheers,
Peter
5o9 Inc.
May 29, 2008 at 3:02 am
Peter,
Thanks! I love where you are going with your post. You clearly know much more about GPS than I, so would love your thoughts on my GPS post. I haven’t started it, but one of the ideas I had in mind was providing location information to all web services, including search — which you mentioned above. Now I’m going to have to come up with something else
Would love to have a chat with you about what you’re working on.
Thanks,
Mike
May 29, 2008 at 4:47 am
So, it would seem, modern communications technologies like email, instant messaging, social networking, vitality feeds (e.g., Facebook’s News Feed, FriendFeed), Twitter, blog RSS feeds, and mobile phones are taking social grooming to the next level. Either by allowing us to expand our social group size [beyond 150] without a commensurate cost in time spent engaged in social grooming.
Dunbar’s number is a function of your neo-cortex. It’s not clear that any of the electronic technologies significantly increase your ability to manage a “tribal” or “emotional” relationship, although they may vastly increase the number of superficial relationships that you have. Mobile phones may be the exception, since voice communicates a considerable amount of emotion, but if you are not devoting your full attention to the conversation (e.g. you are driving) it probably doesn’t enhance the relationship.
See Christopher Allen’s Life With Alacrity posts The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes and Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections for some analysis of group size in Internet-mediated communities.
May 29, 2008 at 5:01 am
Excellent comment Sean. Thanks.
Dunbar discusses the efficiency gains that language brought to social grooming in his paper (relative to physical grooming). Among them was the ability to multitask (do many things while “grooming”) and another was the ability to speak to a number of people at once (broadcasting). While I agree that the degree of impact is unknown at this point, don’t you think that it’s pretty clear that there is *some* gain in social “productivity?” Many relationships have a significant electronic component (email, for example). Electronic notifications (e.g., birthday reminders) help us get a big bang for our time-spent buck. And finding common likes and friends helps us spend the time we have together in person more efficiently…
June 2, 2008 at 6:05 pm
If the test is interactions that build trust, my sense is that there is much less value to text interactions than synchronous voice or face to face. I don’t think you can substitute text-only interactions in establishing a trust relationship, although they may complement and enrich other modes. In maintaining a relationship you may be able to use a certain amount of text-only, but I suspect that the relationship is on the path to a “weak tie” (a prior shared success you can re-activate) instead of an active relationship.
If I paid someone else to call you for me, it wouldn’t have the same impact as you calling me directly.
This year more people remembered my birthday than in the past few years combined, thanks to Facebook.
I find the automatic birthday reminder to be in the same category (or services that automatically send birthday cards). Folks didn’t remember your birthday, they used an external reminder to start a conversation with you: you could just have easily put a notice on your blog “my birthday is coming up on xx” and been pleased that a number of folks remembered it.
My argument is not whether you can have a larger set of acquaintances that are electronically mediated, but that true friendships require synchronous contact. From my perspective, the telephone has done more to expand our Dunbar number than e-mail. The seductiveness of E-mail is that it can be one to many and seems much more efficient of our time. I just don’t think it’s as effective in establishing or maintaining trust.
I think the fundamental concept of trying to be efficient in maintaining friendships, while it certainly has merit, runs the risk of creating shallow or transaction-oriented relationships instead of friendships and/or deep trust-based relationships. That said, there is nothing wrong with having a lot of acquaintances, it’s just different from friends.
September 15, 2008 at 8:02 am
[...] manager is paid to do the job full time, has more time for ’social grooming’, and can break Dunbar’s limit on group size. In the 1-9-90 rule, journalists can be part of the 1% who are heavy contributors (the other 9% are [...]
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