Networking for Baboons and the Rest of Us

Dr. Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist who wrote his PhD dissertation on the social organization of the gelada baboon. Known today as an expert in primate behavior, he devised a correlation between the brain size of various primates and their average social group size. Guess what? You are a primate. According to Dunbar, human beings only have the capacity to manage between 100 and 230 distinct relationships with other people at any one time. The most commonly accepted number is 150 and that is the source of the infamous Dunbar’s number that has been applied universally to both real life and social media network connections. How many Twitter connections do you have? Facebook?

Obviously there is a difference between the strength of everyone’s network connections. Some are strong, some are weak, and some are non-existent. Technology and social media has given us the ability to connect with people in our lives that would once be left behind in our minds: schoolmates, former coworkers, informal acquaintances we meet at business events. If this is true, everyone should be really careful about considering such connections as just a numbers game. We have come a long way since Harvey Mackay’s Rolodex list of network connections, but management of the list is only a minor concern if we are to network effectively. The type of connection is also important in that it may impact our thinking and decision making.

Strong connections are intuitive. These are the people we see every day in real life or online. These are the people we go to for advice, would lend money to, and some of them we would even call “friend” in the non-Facebook true sense of that word. There is a danger in only depending on these connections for information and advice. Our strongest networking connections are people we select because they are most like ourselves. Collaboration may not be as innovative as we believe because the ideas and opinions they generate will probably be closest to the ones we already have in our crowded brain.

The benefit of weak connections is that they know things, people, and have experienced things that we have not. So looking for a new, progressive, innovative way of looking at a problem will most likely be from someone that is not a person exactly like us. These are also the people who know other people we may need to connect with for jobs and other life sustaining resources. They give us multidimensional networking ability rather than the typical linear process. Their spidery influence on our total network is what makes it a viable network.

Social media has radicalized the ability to reconnect with old friends, lost relatives, classmates, and former coworkers that were once a strong connection, but have been lost through the passage of time. Assuming that I can only manage up to the 230 limit of Dunbar’s estimate of relationships, I must be taxing my poor primate brain to its maximum extent by friending my former best friend in high school on Facebook. In fact, there are dozens of us that have formed a subset of our friend list and stay in touch about kids, grandkids, and other goings-on. Hopefully as these ties strengthen I won’t have to un-Dunbar some of my current friends.

So of my [currently] 8,000+ Twitter connections, how many do I communicate with on a regular basis? Frankly, only a handful, but skimming their tweets expands my knowledge of things and eventually they find their way into a subset of my Twitter account of stronger allies based on how much I can depend on them for help. Hopefully, that help is reciprocal. I will admit to a practice I call Twitter-dipping where I will at one point each day watch the hundred or so tweets just appear before me. Purely by chance, but more often than you would think, something fascinating catches my eye and I retweet them and engage briefly about common interests. I hope that doesn’t impact their Dunbar number… not all brains are created equal.

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