At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor

by Carey Nieuwhof

Starting at the center circle, Dunbar suggested that you and I are hardwired for three to five true friendships—intimate relationships with people whom you have the habit of connecting with at least once a week. You don’t even need to use your other hand to count the number of intimate friendships a human can have. The next circle is the twelve to fifteen people he calls your “sympathy group”—friends you connect with at least once a month who share your values, interests, and often perspectives on life. “Curiously,” he noted, “this is also the typical team size in most team sports, the number of members on a jury, the number of Apostles…and the list goes on.” The total of twenty relationships between these first two circles is about all the people most humans can manage to truly know, said Dunbar.3 But wait…I know way more people than that, you’re thinking. And you’re right. You do “know” the names, bios, and perhaps the kids’ names of a larger group. But Dunbar maxed that number out at 150. Not 300. Not 1,500. Not 1.5 million. Just 150. Why that number? Dunbar noted that the average size of ancient and medieval villages was about 150 people. We were wired to live in meaningful communities of about that size. And somehow that number still plays out in the world today. The 150-person network corresponds to everything from the number of friends you send Christmas cards to (if you still send Christmas cards), to the need to abruptly shift management styles in an organization ...

Dunbar Krueger Effect: D theorizes that we are biologically limited to 150 acquaintances because that is the size of a medieval village.