The Economy of Attention

Do you have a large social circle? Are you bad with names? Here's the science that lets you off the hook: Dunbar's Number (named for its formulator, Robin Dunbar), posits that there's a theoretical limit to the number of stable social relationships any single human can keep track of. That number? About 150. If you regularly interact with more than 150 people on a face to face basis, you are going to run into the natural limits of your tribal brain, evolved over millennia to keep you copacetic with your clan. Nature doesn't care about keeping track of all 850 people in your graduating class, and she doesn't think you should care either.

Dunbar's Number has recently been confirmed by research on an unexpected data resource: Twitter. You'd think that, for all the thousands upon thousands of followers that some people tweet to, and the hundreds upon hundreds of tweeters that some people follow, that we'd see some evidence that social technology was allowing us to venture beyond the limits of our evolution. Not so. Data collected from Twitter over six months, and across 1.7 million users, show that for each user the number of "active relationships" they maintain is between 100 and 200. The "economy of attention" appears to be at a stable set-point. We are wired for quality over quantity, so next time someone forgets your name, smile and forgive.


Read more here: Validation of Dunbar's number in Twitter conversations via arxiv.org