How To Manage Your Social Media - With Help From Monkeys
How studying monkeys and apes has led to a revolutionary way to think about social media - and friendship
This is the story of how, when I was a zoologist fresh out of university, I studied baboons and those baboons and those data led my PhD supervisor to create a radical new theory that, decades later, would forever alter how we view friendship and manage social media.
This article first appeared as a guest post in SmallStack. If you’ve read it before - thank you! - AND scroll to the bottom as I’ve updated the ending!
In the late afternoon, the baboons finally stopped and settled in the shade of an acacia tree. Sunlight glowed through the pods, turned the babies’ protruding ears a delicate shell-pink and highlighted the wheat-blonde tips of their fur. I stopped a few metres away, thankful for the rest after following the troop since they’d risen at dawn. The babies played in the sand or suckled from their mothers; the rest of the troop paired up and took it in turns to groom each other. For the next hour they focused intensely as they combed through their partner’s thick hair, touching lips gently to bare skin and emitting soft grunts.
For a few months before I started my PhD on chimpanzees, I helped on a research project in Namibia, studying chacma baboons.
Little did I know then that the data we were collecting would become part of a revolutionary new theory about the evolution of language and, ultimately, how many friends one can really have.
Even more astonishing was that those baboons, eking out their lives in the harsh Namib desert, would tell us all how to manage social media - and our friendships - three decades later.
How an arcane idea led to a revolutionary theory
My supervisor was Professor Robin Dunbar. Currently an emeritus professor at Oxford University, back then he was based at University College London. In the dusty wood-panelled offices, we’d have lengthy discussions about grooming. Grooming in this context is literally a way of saying, I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine. It removes parasites, but the main aim is touch, intimacy, stress-relief. It says: we’re friends, I support you, I love you.
It’s not just baboons that do it, it’s all primates. But it’s not always equal. Some monkeys are groomed more than others. Some pairs groom each other more than they groom anyone else. But grooming is the social glue that binds primates together.
What Robin was perplexed about was the amount of time primates spend grooming. Chacma baboons, for instance, can spend a fifth of their day grooming. It’s costly behaviour: if you are grooming or being groomed, you can’t eat… or do anything else. Primates (which includes us) are animals with big brains who live in complex social worlds. A big brain is also costly. A human brain, for instance, is nine times larger than any other mammal’s if it were person-sized, and takes 20% of our daily calories to simply keep it ticking over.
The discovery of a magic number
Suddenly, Robin had a light bulb moment. He realised that grooming is an extremely social behaviour. He put everything he’d been thinking about together - brain size, social group size in primates - and created a giant graph where he plotted the brain size of different primate species against grooming time cross-checked with group size and —eureka!
The larger the brain size, the larger the group size and the more time the animals had to spend grooming.1
As Robin told the Guardian, ‘It was about 3am, and I thought, hmm, what happens if you plug humans into this?’
According to the graph, for our brain size, we would live in groups of 150. ‘It looked implausibly small, given that we all live in cities now,’ Robin says, ‘but it turned out that this was the size of a typical community in hunter-gatherer societies. And the average village size in the Domesday Book is also 150.’
The answer is 150
In a nutshell, the more relationships you have, the bigger the group, and the bigger the brain. But there’s a tradeoff—once you spend a quarter to a third of your day grooming, there just isn’t enough time to eat, sleep or do much else.
How grooming led to gossiping
Robin then hypothesised that language evolved as a way to ‘groom’ more than one person at once. Even better, it enabled our ancestors to multi-task—chat whilst foraging, hunting or building a fire.
It might sound a little far-fetched, but Robin’s analysis of what people spend most of their time talking about is other people. Language, Robin says, literally evolved so we can gossip.
In his subsequent research, he discovered that people, no matter their education or job, spend two-thirds of their conversations ‘on matters of social import. Who is doing what with whom, and whether it’s a good or a bad thing; who is in and who is out, and why.’
So, because we have large brains and we can chat to people in order to maintain our social relationships, we were able to live in relatively large groups—of 150 individuals. And although we’re no longer hunter-gatherers, modern groups are similarly sized, whether it’s the number of people in an office, a factory, or a military faction. Even Christmas card lists fit this magic number!
‘150 is the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.’ Robin Dunbar
How many friends can you really have?
Over the next few years, Robin finessed his magic number (which, in 2007, became known as Dunbar’s Number). He discovered that:
1500 is the limit of the number of people you can name, and that you can have
500 acquaintances,
50 people you’d call close friends - close enough to invite to dinner, say,
15 in your close circle of friends; these are the people whom you turn to for sympathy and could confide in,
5 in your close support group, who are your best friends and most beloved family members.
The layers are fluid—friendships change, people fall away or become closer—but the numbers remain the same.
What about social media?
Back then, when Robin was figuring this out and getting his PhD students to watch monkeys, social media was barely a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. The rise of Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and the rest of social media means that we can now monitor hundreds, if not thousands, of people. This is what Meta wants isn't it? Likes and clicks and followers and friends. So surely, those numbers don’t mean much now?
Can you have more friends because of social media?
When all these naysayers (and Robin has done the number crunching, too) looked at the data gathered from social media users, they still found the same magic number: 150.
Research into Twitter/X shows that you can only follow 1 to 200 connections in a stable way over a period of a few months; a study of undergraduate Facebook users showed that no matter how many ‘friends’ the students had, they could only maintain close connections with 75. Even in online gaming—where games can encompass thousands globally—the same figures apply.
What do the numbers tell you?
This means that even on social media, you can only recognise up to 1500 of your followers; 500 will become acquaintances, and you’ll only be able to cultivate 100 to 200 real relationships with people, as you would if you lived in a village where everyone knows everyone else.
What social media can do is keep friendships alive that in pre-digital times might have died out, as Robin told MIT Technology Review. However, according to my old supervisor, it is no substitute for meeting face-to-face. ‘It’s extremely hard to cry on a virtual shoulder,’ he deadpanned to the BBC. ‘There is,’ he says, ‘no substitute for touch.’
So what does this mean IRL (In Real Life)?
For me personally I’ve become mindful of my time and energy and who I really want to be friends with. Over the past few years I’ve implemented the following strategy - I prioritise my friends, family, and acquaintances in this order:
my immediate family
five close friends
my wider family
my local community - virtual as well as in my real life village
friends that I feel close to but are not my closet circle of friends and who don’t live near me.
acquaintances.
For social media, including this newsletter, it’s made me realise that
people with large followings - even if you feel that you are engaging with them and their followers, commenting and liking their posts, supporting them and potentially buying their products - may well not even know your name. And that’s okay, because no one has the brain capacity to keep up with more than two thousand followers.
I’m not going to be able to get to know or engage with all of my own followers and readers on social media.
I do my absolute best to respond to any comments people make either over on Instagram, or here at Substack. However, I’m also mindful that the more time I spend in the digital realm, the less I’m spending with people IRL. It’s got to be a balance. Please forgive me if I don’t get back to you straight away. I have limited brain capacity.
And in writing this article, and reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, I’ve made another momentous decision.
As an author, I was told by my publishers that I had to be on every social media platform there was and to be out there constantly networking and promoting my books. So I did. I created platforms for me as an writer, Sanjida O’Connell, on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and GoodReads (I resisted TikTok and SnapChat). Then when my publishers asked me to change my name for my thrillers, I doubled all these platforms for me as thriller writer, Sanjida Kay.
It’s been exhausting.
And honestly, it hasn’t brought me closer to my readers, for reasons we can now all understand.
So I’ve taken the decision to delete all of it apart from Instagram and this newsletter and community I’m building with you here on Substack.
Finally, I’d like to end by saying I would urge everyone here to remember these numbers. There are only so many people, even in the virtual world, we can truly be friends with.
Above all, let us remember: small is beautiful.
Thank you for reading, my friends.
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Specifically it’s the ratio of the volume of the neocortex to the rest of the brain, as the neocortex is the part of the brain involved in higher cognition and language, including skills such working out who is friends with whom and then talking about them.
References:
Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar, 1996, Faber and Faber, London.
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar, 2021, Little Brown, London
The Limits of Friendship by Maria Konnikova, 2014, The New Yorker