CS371 Blog Post #4 - Tiffany Chan

In this week’s post, I decided to focus on Robin Dunbar’s Number and the Social Brain Hypothesis. Dunbar’s number discusses the limit on human groups, which is around one hundred and fifty individuals. According to the theory, individuals have five close friends, fifteen good friends, fifty friends, and one hundred and fifty acquaintances. This can be applied to early hunter-gatherer societies in the past as well as many modern-day groups. Individuals need to meet their own requirements as well as match their behaviours with others in the group. These numbers represent a range where introverts tend to concentrate on a smaller group of contacts while extroverts tend to have a larger network. Nonetheless, the advent of social media has made Dunbar’s Number not as relevant as it used to be. People are able to make friends with hundreds of people on these social media platforms by easily keeping up with their interests and lives online; we start investing in superficial relationships rather than deep connections. Most people, including myself, have more than one hundred and fifty friends on these platforms where I do not know them on a personal level, but know what they are up to based on what they post online despite us meeting once or twice in our lifetime (Gear, 2016). It becomes quite easy to have a greater pool of connections online all over the world, especially during the times of COVID-19 when we were not able to see people in person. With that being said, do you prefer making friends online or in-person? Why?













References

Gear, C. (2016, December 5). The impacts social media has on your relationships. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@camillegear/the-impacts-social-media-has-on-your-relationships-8bff5158

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