Is there something like a Dunbar's number for autistics?

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You've probably heard of Dunbar's number. The 15 minute talk below provides further context that is worthwhile to understand.

I have a hard time imagining that I could ever keep track of 150 relationships. Even the number of 4 close/best friends mentioned in the talk seems high, and in my case I'd have to include my business partners to reach 4. If I add close family members then there are at best 10 people that I have close relationships with.

How many people do you keep in contact with regularly at least once every 6 months? I could possibly list 30 people, and nearly all of these will be work related, with minimal face to face contact, if any.

I also wonder how many NTs can keep track of 150 relationships?

The one-to-many communication on the Web may forster the illusion of having many relationships.

Hi JBW,

I always find your posts very interesting. Before I try to answer, I wanted to ask a few questions. What does this contact have to involve? I assume you are excluding the contacts on this forum? Or are you?

How would you classify contacts that are business related and made every few months because of that fact only? Like customers? Or the people who are in personal or online groups with you, who you don't know well, but you recognize or have some small degree of familiarity with?

My hypothesis is that the average number of in-person contacts is higher for extroverts than for introverts. Also, people who feel isolated, regardless of the reason, will have lower numbers. The people who feel lonely, but still have superficial connections, will have higher numbers.

The bottom line is, I see that number as my networking potential. If I share my need for a resource, would I be able to get help for it?

Hi DataB4,

On this and other forums, most of the communication is one-to-many, and many dialogues tend to be limited to a few posts – with a few exceptions. As you will have noticed, much of the communication here is limited to a small group of regulars. I engage with this forum sporadically when I find interesting discussions or when I am looking for insights or feedback.

Online I would consider a PM or email dialogue with many interactions over an extended period a relationship. If people respond to each other once or twice as part of a forum thread, that does not communicate sufficient context to qualify as a relationship from my perspective. This short talk https://youtu.be/FDhlOovaGrI does an excellent job of explaining the need for dialogue to establish the common ground for shared understanding.


The way I understand the Dunbar number of 150 is that it is the limit of the number of people that one can know enough about to remember their name, the last few interactions, their interests and dislikes, and perhaps a bit about the people they interact with. It means that up to 150 people can fairly easily coordinate their activities in order to run a community or organisation.

I may be able to remember 150 or more names, but I'd not remember much more beyond these names. If I don't see people every month or so, I can easily lose the connection between the name and the face. If I work with a larger organisation over say 6 months, I may remember 50 people and their names, but much of that knowledge is gone again within less than a year. Also, if I have to operate in such large social environments on a daily basis, which I currently limit to one week per month, my level of stress goes up, my mental batteries are dead at the end of each day, my productivity goes down, and the quality of my sleep suffers.

Realistically I have perhaps 20 people within customer organisations that I have met more than once face to face, where I remember name and face, their role, earlier discussions, and where I make an effort to stay in touch via email, phone once every few months, and the occasional face to face visit. Add to that 6 family members, 2 friends, and 4 business partners, and you've got the total of what I'd consider relationships – roughly 30 people. I could perhaps add another 10 people who are contacts of my wife, but I am not the one who maintains these relationships.

Even if I were living in a small village of 150 people a few centuries ago, with limited travel, so that the same people remain in the same place over decades, I suspect I'd focus on a small subset, and might limit interaction with most of the others to mandatory greetings.

Therefore I wonder to what level of depth and intensity others can maintain up to 150 relationships.

I would agree. The question is how many people are actually investing the time to maintain up to 150 relationships? I know I don't and that I could never do this.

Here it gets interesting. Beyond the 30 to 40 people that I actually "know" at any point in time, there is only the larger group of name-face pairs that I remember, probably somewhat larger than 150 (for example by including distant relatives plus people that I have worked with many years ago, but have not been in contact with since). This group is a potentially useful network, but if you listen to Dunbar's explanations, I doubt whether that group can be considered to contribute to the Dunbar number. Beyond this group of "outdated" contacts, people living today may have hundreds and thousands of online "friends". I would be inclined not to declare these as a part of the personal relationship network, but to view them as the equivalent of a personalised extract from the list of all people on the planet. In other words what most people like to call their network is a more or less random index of names and nothing more.

I saw a live talk by him on social networking and wasn't impressed. When asked questions he mostly made the answers up, for example he said that human babies are born a year premature and so their mothers get Oxycontin releases because it's 12-18 months before they get the reward of their baby smiling...

He also strongly believed that there were essential difference between men and women, uses data from animal research but didn't say it was from animal research until directly asked and didn't address his methodology at all. Plus, he presented really outdated data on internet social networking - from a time where social networking wasn't widely used.

Basically, he presented theories which are contested (having studied psychology myself and also from looking it up afterwards) as fact. He presented no alternative theories or times when data hadn't been found to support his research. Indeed, he also presented things which are extremely shaky as fact - for example the number of friends early humans and neanderthals had and the types of social bonding they did.

That said, he did say that the number of social contacts isn't fixed - people who have greater pain thresholds supposedly have more friends than those who don't. Family members 'take up' spaces, so it wouldn't be 'if you include family members' - it's that your other friends slot around your family. (A romantic partner theoretically takes up two slots and you would push one friend and one family member to the back burner.) People with big families have smaller numbers of friends.

It's only 15 people who would do a favour for you. He says SWAT teams are in groups of 5 because that's the most people a person would be willing to lay down their life for.

150 is meant to be the total number that a functioning and democratic society should contain not the number of people you speak to often. He posits that businesses are deemed as unfriendly/problematic if they contain more than 150 people.

That definitely sounds very intense. I’ve never been diagnosed with ASD, I’m an extrovert, and I still can’t imagine keeping track of 150 people in the depth you describe. In a way, online social networking helps keep track, because I can write notes or search archived conversations to find, say, a good referral source for someone.

As far as investing the time to genuinely know 150 people? No, I don’t think I’ll do this. After a few minutes of thinking about people I talk to on a regular or semi-regular basis and remembering notable interactions, I wrote down 37 people. Then, I looked in my phone, and my contact list reminded me of another 25.

Someone could mention probably about 50 more names and I might be able to tell you something about them, it wouldn’t be much. That list expands again, probably about 40 or 50 more, if you count the people with whom I’ve lost touch in the past. The rest are very very weak connections, though you never know when a weak connection could become stronger because one person or the other might reach out.

Sorry if this categorization is a bit confusing. Most people I know are superficial connections. If I care to, I have to actively go in and remind myself of who people are and what they do, and then reach out to them to get back on their radar for a moment. It works because people search their networks and because people’s random posts pop up on other people’s pages as reminders.

The whole networking culture is superficial, but I’m learning the rules. For those warm, trusting types I don’t understand, even the weakest connections seem to make them trust me more. The one thing that’s real is that the process of giving and receiving introductions brings people together who would have otherwise never met. It’s a numbers game and a way to open doors for people.

It sounds like you don’t have to remember as many people as I do. I try hard to remember all these people because I gather clients that way. I either write and review reminder notes, or I try to create meaningful, memorable interactions. Way easier said than done, as most interactions are pretty dull really.

This is what I interpret as 150 people can fairly easily coordinate their activities in order to run a community or organisation, and I can also following the reasoning and evidence from primates used to arrive at this conclusion.

I am curious about the following:

1. The number of active relationships that people actually manage to maintain on a regular basis, say based on one-to-one dialogue every 6 months or more often, to maintain some level of known common ground and shared understanding. For me that number is probably 30 or less at most times.

2. The total number of relationships that an individual maintains/maintained over periods of 2 or more years, over the course of a lifetime, including the number of dormant relationships that ended simply due to changing circumstances and not due to incompatibility. This number can be much larger than the number above (1.), and it represents a pool of reasonably trusted contacts that in today's online world can be tapped into with minimal effort as needed.

3. The number of current casual contacts that people actively remember from one-to-many interactions, either in the physical realm or in online settings like in this forum. In my case that number is potentially in the ballpark of 150. It could be a coincidence that this number is close to the number that Dunbar talks about.

4. Size of household, a subset of (1.), the number of people that live and interact on a daily basis in the same physical space, over periods of 2 or more years. 3 people in my case.

5. Best trusted friends, co-workers, and close relatives that one has known for a decade or longer, with whom many private details are shared, which can be defined as (1.) - (4.) - (6.). 3 people in my case.

6. Active friends, co-workers, and extended family, which can be defined as (1.) - (4.) - (5). Around 24 in my case.

I would assume that there is significant variability from person to person regarding these numbers, and additionally I assume there are upper bounds for all these numbers based on human cognitive limits.

I am curious about the variability and the upper bounds, as this has direct implications for the design of software tools for communication and knowledge sharing that facilitate trusted collaboration and knowledge validation.

Aspies run into problems with the levels of ambiguity and deception in what I would call "untrusted" environments, both in the physical realm and online. Once the upper bounds for communication and collaboration have been validated via suitable experiments, software tools can assist people in avoiding elaborate self-delusion.

Interestingly I once worked at a company that actively pushed people towards the Dunbar number (although they never called it that, hadn't heard about it until I read this thread). The company varied between 150 and 250 people and they wanted everyone to be friends to improve collaboration and communication within the company. They would frequently hold social events where they would deliberately mix people up, and they also often rotate people within the company so that your close colleagues would change.

It was a good idea and it worked for a lot of people. It didnt work for me. Although I tried, I managed at most 20 close, relaxed and easy working relationships, and those were with the obvious people: people I had worked with the most and had a similar intelligence level and professional interests to me.

It occurs to me that those with autistic characteristics usually don't have much of a chance to reach the Dunbar number (even if they might be mentally capable of it) , because they are limited instead by the number of people they can actually feel connected to. I made polite chit chat with most of the company at one time or the other, but it never achieved anything at all in terms of forming bonds or relationships.

This seems compatible with the amount of relationships I can maintain.


Apparently the NT process of making friends differs significantly from the Aspie process of making friends as I discovered in this thread viewtopic.php?f=3&t=318762. Here the relevant NT perspective:

Small talk is the NT tool for making friends, and seems to be a prerequisite before any closer collaboration. This is in stark contrast to the Aspie tendency to immediately probe for any potential shared interests, and to either cut short the interaction if there is no shared interest, or to dive deep into a topic of mutual interest, which then can lead to a friendship. If your small talk skills don't measure up to NT expectations, then you're perceived as weird or rude, and never pass the friendship barrier, and hence are not seen as a trustworthy collaboration partner.

Thinking about it, this difference in the friendship making process and collaboration style may also explain quite a bit why Aspies are seen as naive, and are vulnerable to exploitation. As soon as I have found someone with a shared interest, I am open to collaboration and keen to share information – the last thing on my mind is that the other person may have a hidden agenda. Over the years I hope I have become a bit more careful before extending trust to new contacts.

Is this questionnaire answer format any better?

1. 62


2. Not sure how to answer this one. Too many years and people to try and figure out who fits into this criteria, who doesn’t, length of association, how casual is it? ETC. I’d rather not deal with this one.


3. Somewhere around 120. The rest are superficial enough that I might not remember them if someone mentions them.


4. 3 people, excluding me.


5. I take this to mean close friends and family, including those I live with, and those who know varying degrees of private details. I have to exclude my best friend and another current friend because it’s been less than ten years, but OK, 13.


6. Same as 1, no? Or is this only those that you see daily in the same workspace or contact regularly as genuine friends?


I would add another category, trusted close people I actually contact at least monthly, where I share private details with them and vise versa. 9


There you have it, the number of social contacts hardly reflects the amount of people to whom I feel close. Go figure. As outgoing as I am, actual shared understanding often eludes me. If I didn't have to network for business, I would have only a small fraction of these contacts.

Thanks for providing information from an extroverted perspective!

We will see if anyone here can honestly claim to be capable of maintaining up to 150 relationships.

There is no need to be overly precise with the numbers relating to the 6 categories. Rough estimates are good enough to assess the [potential lack of] significance of Dunbar's number.

For clarification regarding the categories: (1.) = (4.) + (5.) + (6.)

Or in words:

1. The number of active relationships
=
4. Size of household +
5. Best trusted friends, co-workers, and close relatives +
6. Active friends, co-workers, and extended family

The total number of active + dormant relationships (2.) is also an interesting number from the perspective of the number of people that one will trust more than a stranger or casual contact.

The number of casual contacts might be the 150 that Dunbar is talking about, and is the least interesting source of potentially trustworthy collaborators.