Robin Dunbar is Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, famous for his research on social networks and friendships. He is responsible for ‘Dunbar’s number’, the finding that we can only maintain 150 stable social relationships because of cognitive limits.
How many friends do you have? Perhaps a circle of close friends, followed by people you talk to on a regular basis, to people you recognise and say hello to. Then there are the relationships we maintain online, both followers and the people we follow.
Professor Robin Dunbar’s research looks at what primate behaviour can tell us about how we form and maintain these friendships.
“I spent the first 25 years of my research career studying monkeys and ungulates mainly in East Africa and in Scotland, so I was very attuned to animals and animal behaviour.” This sensitivity to behaviour was helped by a multicultural upbringing – “I grew up embedded in five different cultures and being bilingual in one of them and somewhat conversational in a couple of others. Those got me interested much more in humans.” What brought the two together – primate behaviour and human interaction – was the social brain hypothesis, “an explanation for why primates have very big brains” based on the complex social interactions they have.
Professor Dunbar produced evidence that there was a relationship between individual brain size and the group size of primates, and used the data to see whether this also applied to human groups. “I made a prediction off the back of the equation for primate data and then went away and looked in small scale societies to see whether this number came up.” From the data, Professor Dunbar found that the brain size of humans means that we can maintain up to 150 social relationships. In other words, human groups have a cognitive limit of 150 people.
This number, now known as ‘Dunbar’s number’, then appeared in all sorts of different contexts. “We began to become aware that this number just keeps coming up all over the place. Not just in small scale ethnographic tribal societies, but even in the modern world in all sorts of likely contexts, like in the number of people you phone, even the size of German residential campsites, that was just bizarre.” The idea that there is a fundamental mathematics and logic underpinning how we socialise is a compelling one.
But what do these findings tell us about how we form friendships, and the way that we socialise? The recurrence of 150 suggests something special about social groups of that size, and a related result finds that the optimal number of close friendships is 5. “That got us interested in why these groupings particularly stick together – what it is about these numbers that makes them particularly stable, and what is used to create that sense of community and that’s really what got me into friendships. In the next 25 years or so, my research career was spent trying to figure out what on earth friends are.”
Many of the research findings make intuitive sense, and the scientific evidence explains universal experiences, including why we make social faux pas. The truth is, it takes years of training for our brains to easily process social cues, including non-verbal communication used in everyday social interactions. Professor Dunbar’s work on the first neuroimaging paper looked at where in the brain processed the emotional cues of facial expressions. Only in adult brains was this emotional processing automatic, which in younger ages occurs in the frontal lobes requiring more cognitive effort.
“It takes 25 years to figure out what’s going on before you can automate all this stuff, which probably explains why teenagers struggle so much with their relationships because they are still trying to figure out what’s going on. Eventually you get some intuitive grasp of how this very, very complex world works. [Social interactions are] unbelievably complex, probably the most complex thing in the universe.”
An obvious question is how technology has impacted the way we relate to one another, and whether technology has helped or hindered our social connections. Dunbar reminds us that “these things have happened before.” Take the invention of letter-writing, for example. “I have come across cases where sisters working in different big houses in the same village as domestic servants are writing to each other by the first post saying, I’ll meet you at lunch at the cafe in the village. And by the second post, the reply comes back saying, right, I’ll see you there. These were clearly mostly the younger people because this was the new technology.” Technology has always created generational differences: “they’ve been very similar in [how] they’ve been adopted and [in] the differences they’ve created between generations, but they’ve not completely destroyed society.”
Despite the pervasiveness of FaceTime, Instagram, or texting, the importance of face-to-face interaction was most obvious after the experience of the Pandemic. Yet the significance of in-person interactions is felt even in less extreme circumstances: whether returning home for the vac, or seeing old friends and family, being in the same place as someone is not something that can be replaced by technology, even if it does help us keep in (virtual) contact.
Professor Dunbar explains the science behind this – the truth is tactile. “Notwithstanding digital media, it seems to me the pull of face-to-face interactions is still so much stronger. And that’s what all the research says, because there’s something engaging [in] being able to stare into somebody else’s eyeballs across the table in the bar, or restaurant or whatever. When we are engaged in conversation with each other, in the normal course of life and face-to-face, we do a huge amount of physical touch constantly.” Whether it’s a handshake or a hug, these make a huge difference to our interactions, not least because of the biological response this triggers in our brains. “We have all over our skin these highly specialised receptors […] that are a one-way track to the brain that triggers the endorphin system which is the principal chemical that underpins a sense of bonding. Touch becomes very important, and we do it casually as a pat on the shoulder and a stroke on the arm, or a fiddle with the hair, all these kinds of things you just do with our close friends and family really without thinking about it. It’s this constant, ongoing physical contact that reinforces and builds up this sense of a close relationship.
“It’s clearly because it creates a sense of intimacy. But it also highlights, I think, the fact that touching is very, very important in how we mediate our relationships. I’ve said for a long time that if you really want to know how somebody feels about you, ignore everything they say. Look at how they touch you. Because a touch is worth 1000 words, any day, if you really want to know how they feel about you. You can’t lie with touch. You can lie with words. That’s the bottom line.”
In different group settings, understanding how the endorphin system functions highlights the importance of activities like eating together, and spending time with one another in person. “We’ve found things that allow us to step back from that physical contact, and that means you can then group several people simultaneously [and] therefore increase the size of the group. These include things like laughter and singing and dancing and stuff, but interestingly, they also include eating together. Drinking alcohol together is a really big trigger for the endorphin system. It’s not the alcohol, but the endorphins you get addicted to.”
We just don’t get the same response from online interactions, and Professor Dunbar suggests there are limits to sustaining friendships that don’t have the same in-person interactions. “There’s something weird that goes on in the dynamics of relationships, the chemistry of relationships, when you’re in a face-to-face context, and part of that is being able to see the emotional expressions in full size.” Even if technology is able to solve the tactile elements of social interaction, Professor Dunbar thinks “there are some limits beyond which there’s a mystery. In the chemistry of how this works, that is simply not translatable via the internet, sadly.” This certainly helps explain the knee-jerk negative reaction at the prospect of transferring our real-life interactions into a technological metaverse.
Although messaging and seeing our friends’ stories are ways of keeping up with what they’re up to, Professor Dunbar thinks that friendships have a built-in ‘decay function’, where people naturally drift further and further apart. “My conclusion, having worked on this and talked about it a lot, is that what the technology does is act as a good sticking plaster. It slows down the rate at which friendships would naturally decay if you don’t see people.”
The research suggests that it takes about three years of not seeing a good friend for them to become an acquaintance, “somebody you once knew but kind of lost track of. […] They’ve changed and you’ve changed and your interests have changed so that you would no longer have as much in common as you had when you were seeing each other regularly. […] My sense is what digital media does, and what social media does in particular, is slow down that rate [of decay]. They hold it there, but nothing is going to stop that friendship becoming an acquaintance-ship if you don’t see them in person long enough. So, at some point, you have to keep meeting up to reboot things.”
#oxfess29033: Who runs Oxfess?!
Who runs Oxfess? That’s the simple question that no one in this university seems to have an answer to. Oxfess is the heart and soul of student communication at Oxford. It’s where we can be our truest, most unfiltered Oxselves. And yet, we have no idea who manages this platform at all. Who is the Rupert Murdoch that controls us all?
A quick search on the current Oxfess page shows that the first post was made on the 14th December, 2020. For an institution that feels so firmly embedded in everyday life at Oxford, this is surprisingly recent. In these three years, nearly 30,000 posts have been made. From Oxsh*gger to Oxsh*tter, relentless complaints about workload to desperate, grasping Oxloves – it is all present on the Oxfess hivemind. Anything and everything that an Oxford student can think of has been put out on Oxfess.
That’s what really makes Oxfess so special to this university – it is incredibly accessible. The veil of anonymity exposes the deepest, most depraved desires of an Oxford student for all to see, our unchecked horniness and our unfettered groupthink. I would even go so far to say that it is the most authentic voice of Oxford students, more than any of the big, institutionalised student forums. The SU, any of the JCRs, even student newspapers – they can’t compete with how well Oxfess brings to the light our most unhinged selves.
Then, if it is so vital to student life, if it is Oxford’s bubbling subconscious, why do we know barely anything about how it’s run? All the other student platforms are largely democratic and transparent. The SU and the JCRs are elected, and their inner workings are (somewhat) open to scrutiny. Similarly, student newspapers are always open to complaints and suggestions, and their entire machinery is student-run. Even the Union, for all its vices, is of the students, by the students, for the students.
But Oxfess remains a mystery. Certainly, it is meant for Oxford students. Is it of and by the students? Even I, a certified Oxfess Top Fan™, don’t know, and I’d bet most of you lot don’t either. If I could hazard a guess, it was probably set up by some enterprising student (Hamish Nash or Shu Huang?), and given that four years have passed, they’re probably not at Oxford anymore. Maybe they still manage it in their spare time elsewhere, or maybe they’ve handed it down to someone else who’s still at Oxford. Yet, it’s equally likely that it was set up by some shady Rupert Murdoch-esque opportunist that now controls their media empire with an iron fist. How dare we abide by such ignominy!
I’d like to clarify that I’m not encouraging or asking anyone to doxx or harass the Oxfess admins (please, I don’t want to be sued for libel). They clearly don’t want to make their identity public, and it’s completely fair to respect that. Oxfess is a Facebook page that they own, and it’s their choice how they want to manage it. None of us have a ‘right’ to it.
Nevertheless, I think it’s worth asking the student community how we think student communication should be managed. We strive to make our forums democratic and transparent because free and fair discussion is important to us. Then, do we want our favourite gossip page to remain in the grip of Big Brother?
The opacity of Oxfess makes the admin a virtual despot. Which posts will be approved and which ones won’t? They alone decide, and we cannot challenge them. Surely the OxDespot has biases, like all of us do – how are we certain that the posts we see don’t reflect them? When controversy breaks out, and they believe one side over the other, can we be sure they aren’t flooding Oxfess with only posts supporting their side? When transphobic, classist, racist, sexist posts are submitted, it’s their definition of what ‘crosses the line’ that decides which get approved. Big Oxfess has total control over the platform; they shape the content of our thoughts with their subliminal propaganda.
In truth, Oxfess seems to be moderated reasonably well. I think the variety of posts are (more or less) unbiased and representative of us students; I know I’d much rather complain about my flatmates’ disgusting habits to strangers than talk the problem out. And when troublesome topics do come up, there’s usually a decent job done at handling them. But I don’t really know that for sure. And I have no assurances as to how long this quality of moderation can last. For the moment, we’re relying on the benevolence of an unknown Oxtyrant to get by; like Kim Jong-Un, their hand may drift over to the big red button anytime. I don’t think Oxford’s subconscious should be like that – no, we as students simply cannot abide such a thing. We have bent all the other student platforms to our will; now we must seize the means of communication!
But I’m not entitled to demand that Oxfess open itself up to scrutiny; none of us are. At the same time, we need to be aware that, as long as we continue to consume content on Oxfess, we will be subjected to the yoke of media tyranny. Only we can emancipate ourselves.
The clearest solution is to return to democratic and transparent student forums – student newspapers and the like. Fat chance of that. Who’d be arrogant enough to imagine that a ghastly echo-chamber like Cherwell genuinely represents Oxford students? Oxfess has the anonymity and convenience that lets us be as deranged as we want. That isn’t unique to Oxfess, however – any anonymous confessions page can do that too. So maybe the answer is a competitor to Oxfess, one that’s of, by, and for the students. But problems here arise too. Oxfess simply has the first-mover advantage, the name recognition, the prestige that takes years to build; like Murdoch’s media monopoly, it is too big to fail. It is too entrenched to be seriously challenged, let alone displaced, by some new page. The only chance for such a thing to succeed would be for the SU to fund it, and that means SU oversight. Who wants them in charge of anything that’s actually important? At least our current despot has some sense of humour. I shudder to imagine a regime run by the SU – they’d probably ban Oxhates.
As far as solutions go, nothing seems immediately visible. Unless some new idea can come up that can displace Oxfess, we will continue to be mind-controlled by this murky despot, the Rupert Murdoch of Oxford. How long do we want to continue like this?