You choose your friends, but only 150 of them

Interesting talk from TEDxObserver given by Robin Dunbar :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07IpED729k8&list=PL880EAF3F736F99AC&index=6&feature=plpp_video
"Robin, currently director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Oxford, is renowned for creating a formula which is now known as 'Dunbar's number' - and that number is 150. This calculates the 'cognitive limit' of the number of people we can hold meaningful friendships with. When it was first formulated it created a fevered debate about the nature of and the differences between, online and real 'friendships'.
Robin will explore the psychology and ethology of romantic love to find out if the brain - and science - can help us explain how and why we fall in love."

In the talk he mentions also that we have circles of levels of friendship, with the average number of close friends being 5, then a next level of about 15, etc. Perhaps not surprisingly being in a romantic relationship costs 2 close friends, due mainly to the lack of time available to devote to such friendships. Indeed time spent is a key factor in how friendships are maintained, though there are it seems gender differences, with women spending more time in verbal communication (average female phone call was something close to an hour) than men (average phone call something like 7 seconds! 'meet you at 10? yip! grand so'). And face to face time, meeting in person or even skype, is the most valuable of all, which indicates that online relationships face major hurdles in being maintained

Also interesing is from this guardian interview with him on the question as to whether Dunbar's number can be increased :

"We're caught in a bind: community sizes were designed for hunter-gatherer- type societies where people weren't living on top of one another. Your 150 were scattered over a wide are, but everybody shared the same 150. This made for a very densely interconnected community, and this means the community polices itself. You don't need lawyers and policemen. If you step out of line, granny will wag her finger at you.
Our problem now is the sheer density of folk – our networks aren't compact. You have clumps of friends scattered around the world who don't know one another: now you don't have an interwoven network. It leads to a less well integrated society. How to re-create that old sense of community in these new circumstances? That's an engineering problem. How do we work around it?"

Since a major issue in the modern world is how to view, shape and even sign up to 'society' then the fact that our brains are evolved for such small social groupingswill have to be taken into account. Perhaps one element of a solution would be to consider 'groups' as 'persons'. So maybe if one viewed 'other commuters' or 'Germany' or 'bankers' as 1 of the 150 individuals one can keep track of, then it would allow the rest of society to be some how kept socially 'in mind' rather than being a blurry 'other'. Of course the main problem with this would be the risk of stereotyping and blanket generalization, but since we have know complex and deep individuals, maybe we can similarly have 'friendship' with complex and complicated groups. Of course this is just a spur of the moment idea, but the point is we need to take our natural dispositions into account if we are to adapt to the modern world.