Dunbar's Number

Is it relevant to our daily lives or our current society?

Is Dunbar's number representative of how many people we can "conceive of as people instead of one dimensional characters" like a certain cracked article argued, or does it tell us how many stable and consistent relationships we can carry on socially at a time?

There seems to be a lot of confusion with what this concept actually entails, me included, so here's a link to wikipedia just because.

edited 8th Dec '11 6:04:11 PM by ViralLamb

Sometimes known as the "monkeysphere," yes?

Thank you Cracked.

Anyhow, yeah, I'd say it's relevant, though I'm not sure whether or not it's actually an accepted, proven idea yet, scientifically-speaking. If it is, it would be huge, and coincide with my hypothesis that humans are, at some base level, hopelessly selfish creatures...

I simply don't behave the way I'm supposed to behave if it works the way people say it works.

Short answer: yes!

Well, it's an average. There is a huge variation in the number of relationships that different people can manage. Most people know several dozen others on a first name basis at any one time. There are a very few people who know hundreds.