Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Important Relationships with
Professor Robin Dunbar, University of Oxford

Thursday, June 24
12-1 PM EST

The single most important factor influencing our wellbeing, our health, and even our longevity, is the number of close friends we have. There are, however, constraints on the number of friends we can have: the human social world is actually very small scale. These constraints come from two sources: cognitive constraints arising from the Social Brain Hypothesis and constraints imposed by the fact that the time available for social bonding is limited. These create a tradeoff that optimizes the number of relationships we can manage at any one time. Drawing on studies from a number of different approaches, Robin Dunbar will show how and why these constraints exist, how some of them derive from deep within our primate ancestry but others are peculiar to humans because of the way we have tried to scale up the size of our social world beyond anything that primates can manage.


About the Speaker:
Robin Dunbar MA Ph.D. DSc(Hon) FRAI FBA is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, and an elected Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Anthropological Institute. His principal research interests focus on the evolution of sociality (with particular reference to primates and humans). He is best known for the social brain hypothesis, the gossip theory of language evolution, and Dunbar’s Number (the limit on the number of relationships that we can manage). His publications include 15 authored or edited academic books and nearly 550 scientific journal articles.

In addition, he has published a great deal of science print journalism in newspapers and magazines, and 11 popular science books, including The Trouble With Science, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, The Human Story, Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide [with L. Barrett and J. Lycett], How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, The Science of Love and Betrayal, Thinking Big [with C. Gamble and J. Gowlett], Human Evolution, and Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships [Little Brown].