It would be no exaggeration to say that the types of stories and essays we receive for our Guest Post Series are wildly creative. When we asked for folks to step forward with their ideas, we didn’t really know what to expect. And so, of course, we were delighted when Sanjida’s writing about monkeys and their approach to community captured our imaginations. Part science, part storytelling, today’s essay helps us understand more about our own humanity and how we naturally form the bonds of community in all types of spaces. SmallStack is pleased to welcome Dr. Sanjida O’Connell!
What monkeys can tell us about community
by Dr. Sanjida O’Connell — Wild Writing with Sanjida
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 how to run our Substacks three decades later.
How an arcane idea led to a revolutionary theory
My supervisor was Professor Robin Dunbar, who at the time was based at University College London before becoming an emeritus professor at Oxford University. 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. However it’s not always equal. Some monkeys are groomed more than others. Some pairs groom each other more than they groom anyone else. Ultimately, 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 it 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 as he realised that grooming is an extremely social behaviour. He put everything 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, spent 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. 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.
You can also 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?
You lovely people are part of the SmallStack community. I think you know what I’m going to say. 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 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.’
How does this affect Substack?
Even on Substack, the largest Substackers offer face-to-face meetings:
, who runs The Hyphen (with over 49,000 subscribers), recently held her first podcast for Substack in person. It was attended by 70 of her subscribers. She interviewed of Things Worth Knowing (over 42,000 subscribers), whose own subscribers independently arranged to meet up before the event.For me personally, I’ve been a little upset that one of the mega-Substackers didn’t have any idea who I was in spite of me having attended two masterclasses, an online Zoom meet-up where I introduced myself, posting frequent comments, restacking of notes and sending several emails (they said, not sure who they are, in the email so I know I’m not being hypersensitive!). I’m sure some of you have had similar experiences. Reminding myself of Robin Dunbar’s numbers makes me feel less hurt or judgmental. You just can’t know or even recognise everyone if you’re a BigStack.
For the SmallStack audience, I think this research is wonderful news. We are naturally going to be able to form deep and intimate connections with some of our subscribers. We are, by definition, going to know everyone who subscribes to us as an individual. Of course, some of us want to grow and will grow, but 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.
Sanjida has wanted to be a zoologist and a novelist since she was five. So far she’s had twelve books and a few short stories published. She’s worked as a TV presenter, director and columnist and journalist. She writes about writing, wildlife and wilderness at Wild Writing with Sanjida, and would love you to join her for writerly chat, deep dives into how to write fiction, particularly crime and nature fiction. She’s also serialising her nature memoir Wilderness for Substack readers, which is about our search for belonging and why we all need the wild to thrive.
From the whole SmallStack Team, we’re sending out a great big THANK YOU to Sanjida for creating this wild and wonderful lesson in community. If you enjoyed this, please tell us about it in the comments!
All stacks great and small,
The SmallStack Team
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
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 as working out who is friends with whom and then talking about them.
Spot on!
a truly amazing read, thank you very much !