British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed, in the 1990s, a now-famous figure: roughly 150 stable social relationships the human brain can maintain at once, based on correlations between neocortex size in primates and social group size.
The number was widely picked up in popular culture, from how companies are organized to the size of traditional villages, treated almost as a “natural law” of human relationships.
A 2021 statistical re-analysis questioned the precision of the exact figure, showing that the plausible range, depending on method, can vary enormously – from a few dozen to several hundred.
The exact number remains debatable, but the underlying idea held up: everyone eventually hits a real limit on how many relationships they can actively maintain.
See also:
– Relationships & Special Occasions →