Will You Have Fewer Friends After Lockdown?
Even if some of our relationships have got rusty during the pandemic, our social circles will recover — to about 150 people, to be precise.
Well below the Dunbar Number.
Photographer: Ye Aung Thu/AFP via Getty Images
As many countries tentatively loosen their corona restrictions, some of us are feeling anxious. Have my social skills gotten rusty from long quarantines and lockdowns? Have my friendships gone stale? Will I still have my old clique to return to? Have my social circles frayed or shrunk?
To get a scientific perspective, I put these questions to Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist. I’ve kept tabs on his research for almost three decades, ever since he wrote a groundbreaking paper in 1992. Dunbar discovered a remarkably stable ratio across all species of primates between the size of their neocortex and their social group: the larger the brain, the larger the community.