Why you need to delete most of your Facebook friends
In the 1990s, the anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar proposed a cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships a person can maintain.
But how do you define a stable social relationship? Aside from knowing the person’s name and being confident that they don’t hate you, a slightly more well-adjusted definition would be to say that you know them well enough to have a decent conversation. Or perhaps that you would comfortably comment something nice under the pictures of their inevitable post-lockdown sightseeing trip to Europe.
Dunbar’s definition was ‘anyone that you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar’. Which is a great definition if you were not dressed up as a banana when you bump into them — which, I suppose, could happen — and might artificially inflate embarrassment.
Dunbar believed that once this threshold on stable relationships is exceeded you need to implement systems and rules to keep a group together in a way that, up until that number, you could do mentally.
This number, according to Dunbar, is 150.
That means for your first 150 friends, you should be able to remember their current job, the name of their pets (and, whilst we’re there, children), have…
