Dunbar's number

English

Alternative forms

  • Dunbar number

Etymology

Proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.

Proper noun

Dunbar's number

  1. A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
    • 2020, Michael Wooldridge, The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI‎[1], Penguin UK, →ISBN:
      Dunbar's number might have remained a curiosity but for the fact that subsequent research found that this number has arisen repeatedly, across the planet, in terms of actual human social group sizes.
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