Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f1703bb96858d872

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My guest today is Robin Dunbar.
Robin is a biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behavior.
He is the man behind Dunbar's number, a theory about the number of stable relationships we can maintain at once.
Robin unravels the thread of research that led him to Dunbar's number and describes how this plays
Into every single person's layers of human connection.
It was fascinating to hear how his findings on social circles have implications for optimally structured businesses and organizations, as well as the idea.
A homophily, all of which Robin thoughtfully explains.
It was a treat to get to explore these topics with Robin Dunbar himself, so please enjoy this great conversation.
Robin, thanks for doing this with me. I have to start with the obvious question, which is I would love to hear
The story
behind you arriving at the incredibly famous Dunbar's number.
Oh my goodness. How long have you got? I got a long time.
Yeah, quite a convoluted story, really, actually, because
There was a proposal made back in the late eighties that
Reason Primates Monkey's neck said.
much bigger brains than anybody else was that they
lived in complex societies and therefore need a big computer to manage this. But it was based on
Largely casual observation as much as anything.
And that was a real problem because primates do have much bigger brains.
This stuff is expensive.
Why would you be
carting around all this heavy duty.
computer consuming energy like Fury if if
You weren't doing anything different to what everybody else is doing.
So anyway, this just was made is to do with the complexity of the social systems and I have the
bright idea one evening when I was trying to solve a completely different problem, which is why primates groom each other.
the if that hypothesis is true, then we ought to find correlation between some measure
of group size in primates and
their brain size. And so I collated data on group sizes and I collated data on brain sizes.
stack them together and sure enough, there's uh
Very nice relationship.
And now we're about three o'clock in the morning and getting
quite excited about how this is going. It occurs to me that
We should be able to use this to predict what humans.
Group sizes are.
So I did.
This gave me a number about a hundred and fifty. So I then spent obviously the rest of the night and several other days and nights.
Sitting in the library.
Looking for data.
Natural human group sizes.

Metropolis is like
New York and London and Tokyo in mind, they're all very recent things, barely a century old.
We spent most of our time in
small scale hand together groups. Looking for data on the size of these groupings.
Cause
Quite complex grouping is not just a single group bound together as like we do live in sort of multi-layered social systems. So I was looking for.
A layering.
within their social systems that was about a hundred and fifty in size rather than say two thousand or
twenty five.
And sure enough, there is one. It's generally called a clan or a regional grouping or something like that. It's basically a unit that shares.
hunting territory as much as anything that shares the rights in territory, let's say. They don't necessarily all live deer.
And after that
We just kept finding this number.
Everywhere everywhere we looked in the modern world. Our entire modern world is built round this number.
Hundred and fifty.
Can you explain the scaling up and scaling down of the number that sort of
dividing by three or multiplying by three, and the fact that you then see this bizarre
nesting or layering everywhere too. So it's not just the one fifty, but it's these other
Scalar
Versions of Dunbar's number as well.
Think of it best in terms of your personal social network, all the family, extended family and friendships you have.
If you look at those and the frequencies with it you contact them or how emotionally close you feel to them,
Oh
your willingness to do them
A favour that would
Cost you
Something serious. Not a question of just putting it.
dollar in a Vegas box, as they say.
But actually.
Giving it.
A significant amount of money they asked you to lend
Money for a project.
All of these
reveal a kind of laid structure. And that layered structure looks pretty much like
the ripples on a pond where you throw a stone into a lake, for example.
So if you think of yourself as the stone.
surrounding you these layers moving out from you.
And as you go further and further out.
The
Area
Covered, but
each ripple.
gets bigger and bigger, but the kind of amplitude of the wave, the height of the wave gets lower and lower, and that's
quite a good metaphor for what your social world looks like. So you have these
series of layers going out from you, which increase in size.
But the quality of the
relationship and the frequency with which you contact them gets
Smaller and smaller and smaller, lower and lower as you go further out.
So these layers occur at very, very specific numbers.
Core is really this hundred and fifty number, Dunbar's number. But within that
There are a series of layers at fifty
Fifteen five.
And the smallest one at one and a half, one point five.
And then beyond the hundred and fifty going out furthest there are layers at five hundred.
fifteen hundred and the last possible one is five thousand, because five thousand
Identifies the number
Oh.
faces you can say whether you've seen them or not before. In other words
the distinction between a complete stranger. I've never seen that face in my life.
And somebody
You've seen
But um
Probably for most of them you don't know much about.
We don't even know their name, maybe, but then
The fifteen hundred layer within there.
which actually turns out to be the s typical size of tribes in hunter gather societies. The distinction there is that you can put names to faces. So for all of us
Whether you like it or not.
Nice Mr. Donald Trump is in your fifteen hundred layer. But that's only because if you saw him in the street.
Downtown you would recognize him straight away.
But if you kind of wandered up to him, slapped him around the shoulder and said, Donald, come and have a drink with me.
He would look very surprised.
I'm sure he'd be a good politician and pretend not to be, but so it's that kind of relationship. And as you come further in, the five hundred layer is the layer of of acquaintances.
Many of the people you work with will be in that layer. In other words, you might go and have a beer with them after work.
You might even spend a weekend away for some big
work related project with them, but you would never invite them back to your home for a big party.
Your hundred and fifty lair? Well that's what I always call your barmits for weddings and funeral party.
These are the people who will turn up out of obligation to
on that big once in a lifetime event.
You may not know they're there the the third case, the funeral.
party, but believe me, they'll be there.
And then as you come in, so the relationships getting stronger and stronger, you go through the f fifteen layer is your sympathy group, the people who
you would feel extremely upset about if they die. That's
been known for a very long time. I didn't discover that.
And then inside that is this layer at five, the cinema's layer, which is what we call the shoulders to cry on, friends.
And that layer turns out to be very important for it. It usually consists of two family members and two friends, plus an odd one from either side.
That number turns out to be
the one that has the most influence on your general health and well being. So the best predictor of your
mental health and well being, your physical health and well being and
Even how long you're going to live into the future from today.
Is predicted by
The number and quality
Of
friendships you have in that layer.
Define as an average. So if you only have three, then but because introverts tend to prefer to have fewer people but have stronger friendships as a result, extroverts tend to prefer slightly more.
people but have weaker friendships. Those kind of
If X, but on average very much five. So as I like to say, if you really want to live forever.
Just make sure you've got five friends.
And what about the one point five? That seems like a odd number in the the end of the cycle.
I always used to sort of come out with this joke when I was giving talks'cause I actually thought it was a joke.
Which was we'll just look at these series of circles and how
Very tight.
the kind of fractal mathematical structure is. Each layer is three times the size of the layer inside it.
And remember these layers count cumulatively, so
The your hundred and fifty layer includes
the fifty people in the lair inside. It's not an addition.
But just look at it
the regularity of this structuring of these numbers, and surely there's a a layer missing. If you project backwards,'cause if we only knew about the five, we thought the five was the smallest number.
If you project backwards, there's a number missing. And what is it? Well, it's one and a half.
And everybody'd say, Well, how can you have one and a half relationships?
The answer is obvious. Think about it.
Half the population has one
Very, very close.
friend in that circle, and the other half the population has two.
What might the difference be? Well the answer is gender. It's obvious.
And if you want to know which way it goes round.
He says jokingly.
Well, it's men only have one in that circle and women have two.
That was kind of
Pulling the leg of the audience really,'cause the audience goes, Uh huh.
That's your your romantic relationships. Clearly women have one and men have two. And then my collaborator said
In Italy.
who are analyzing Facebook data.
And said, You know, we get this lair at one and a half.
We think we must have made some error here. They're looking at the frequency of postings and showing very nicely you get these little
You can identify these layers, but they'd found this extra layer. And I went, What? What in a half
Perfect. That's it. What's it all about? Well, we don't know. So when we looked into it, yes.
It's true.
And the question is
Why are we having two?
And the answer is they have a platonic friend called a best friend forever.
B F F and that's nearly always of another woman. Not a hundred percent.
But eighty five percent of women at any one time.
Have a best friend forever.
Because
the social psychologists who've explored this question.
Have told us that
constant reason that women always give is because
their romantic partner, who statistically obviously is usually a male.
It's completely useless.
At emotional.
Yeah.

You need some else who's
Better qualified to deal with emotional issues.
To sort of
Deal with that part of your life and the only person that falls into that.
Little bracket as it were, is
Is a girlfriend.
Interestingly enough, when they have a male, fifteen percent of them are male, those males tend to be much more feminized.
than the average male. So they're often gay men, for example. And what's interesting is that uh you can ask a guy
Do you have a best?
male friend to kinda do stuff with and and
They often they'll say, Yes, Jimmy.
Jimmy and I go for it.
beer together now and again. We've known each other since primary school.
And you explore a bit further the quality of that relationship, but you go, This is not a best friend forever. It's completely different.
'Cause if Jimmy decides he's going off to Thailand for the rest of his life, it is a case of out of sight, out of mind.
If he comes back again, you can pick up where you left off. No problem. But
While he's not there, it's really a case of outside the moment.
Which will never ever happen.
with women, their friendships, their
Um
social media that on the phone.
whatever, trying to keep that relationship going and keep it ticking over.
And guys don't do that. What's interesting in that particular context, though, is that it's very clear that men either have one or the other. That's why they only have a peer.
With one.
if you like, in that layer rather than the one and a half that or to two that the women have.
Of course it's the average of
The mail's one and
Women's two that makes the one and a half for that there.
But men tend to have either a romantic partner or
a best friend. So if they don't have a romantic partner at the time or
these things happen as you get older, the the intensity of a romantic relationship.
Cools, as you might say, politely.
And then they might
We
Institute.
A male best friend at the
Hang out with.
I'm sure that you have looked at
an incredible amount of data and that the
Internet and social networks and
just the world of digital data has
exploded your ability to explore these ideas and these numbers.
What has been the most surprising that you've ever encountered in or around your ideas?
There are two prizes potentially here. One was a very notorious study of Facebook, which was published in a very eminent journal about ten years ago.
Which became notorious because they'd used Facebook to manipulate people's feeds because they were interested in trying to understand what influence.
feeds had on people's perceptions of the world's what we all worry about. Nice Mr Putin sending us endearing messages on our
Pages to vote for one president candidate or another presidential candidate.
According to the one he would really prefer.
There are serious issues behind this, but
I'm afraid they got into a lot of trouble. Anyway.
They have sixty one million.
as I recall Facebook pages.
that they worked with. That's a huge sample. Ginormous.
Probably talking about what is it?
One percent of all the people.
billion people on Facebook or something of that sort. Huge, huge sample from all over the world.
And they came out with an average number of friends on Facebook of a hundred and forty nine. Wow.
No.
Believe me.
If you work on animal behavior or human behavior like I do,
you do not often get predictions that come out that close. So I think on the strength of that, I'm entitled
To go.
Go past go. Cut my two hundred dollars.
And retire to the Caribbean.
The other one was really cool because we'd done a lot of work and a lot of other people just started to work on
which bits of the brain are involved in this and showing that you can predict
The number of friends that people have in their social circles. Friends of family, of course.
by the size of particular regions in the brain. Turns out to be a particular huge
neural network that we use to process social information.
There's some Korean guys who did an entire village.
Yeah.
What they did was kind of neat because most of the time what we're having to do is to ask people
How many friends have you got?
How many friends you got on Facebook?
Che.
Write down a list of all the friends and family you have. Who are you phoning? Let's look at your phone calling records on your cell phone. So we're always looking at it from
The individual's point of view, you know, well
Yeah, okay, you can argue.
The list of people I
Phone regularly.
Looks.
fairly hard nosed and convincing, but you know, there may be people that that actually have close relationships with
That I don't phone because like they kinda live next door all in the same house. So I don't bother to phone them. And if I ask people just who are your friends.
Famously, if you ask.
Sort of
uh kindergarten and primary school kids.
Who are your friends, they'll say, you know, Jimmy, Susanna
Penelope and then you go to Jimmy Zan and Penelope and and ask them.
Are you friends with Santa? And I'll say, What? Never.
So who knows if if the data we have is really reflective of
the relationships. And what these Korean guys did is they went to everybody else in the village and said, Are you friends with
Each person.
I say it was
The friend's evaluation of their true relationship with you.
That identifies the number of friends that you as an individual had. And what they showed very nicely was that
Indeed, the number of friends that
Everybody could claim
Because these people said yes, I'm their friend.
correlated with the size of these things.
regions in the brain. So I think that was
Quite spectacular, but
They were able to do something which nobody else
had actually been able to do.
What do you think are the most interesting
implications of this understanding
of how we work in groups.
They seem to be almost
Just
latent features of
our species and of other primates too.
Is there something to do with them that you think is the most productive?
And or like did you change?
your behavior having discovered all this in your own life.
What's the news you can use here, in your opinion?
You mean did I look at my friendship circles and go, Oh my goodness, I need to get out more. Something like that. Well, it does happen.
When you do this kind of research.
In the end, what's important about these
circles and here's another interesting feature actually I this this we hadn't quite expected.
Is that it
Turns out that this relationship between brain size and group size and primates is not a single
homogeneous set of data. So the data points don't lie on the same line, which is ideally what you want. They
scattered quite widely round it. And it's turned out since we've only recently been able to show this.
Finally.
Statistically, in fact, that relationship consists of four
S sense of
statistical relationships. So they're like four grades.
And the grades differ in both group size and
cognitive complexity that the animals are using. So these
grades have real meaning. And it turns out that the layers
for our social networks.
for these values in this fractal series of fifty, fifteen, fifty, hundred and fifty, five hundred, fifteen hundred actually fall on these grades beautifully.
And we see the same structure.
in primates and said this is number four really. So that was number three surprise.
Number four surprise was to find that this was the same thing was true of primates. Species like
chimpanzees and baboons, which have complex multi level social systems.
the layers within their social groups created again
But
Frequency as it should.
Interact with each other.
Strength of the friendships if you like.
also fall on these layers. So there's something about these layers
which is these numbers, which is kind of magical in this sense. And so
This is number five surprise actually. Where's a bunch of
US mathematicians.
we were able to show that these numbers
five, fifteen, fifty hundred, and fifty five hundred are actually
Optimal points.
in the efficiency with which information flows round network.
If whatever your group is hits one of these numbers, then it works.
as a an integrated group somehow. We don't quite understand wh why this happens, but it seems to work in a much more efficient integrated
cohesive sort of way. But if you're in between
Things kind of fall apart.
So there are all sorts of implications here.
For the structure of
organizations and businesses in terms of how they
Organized there.
departments, how they organise their work groups, for example.
You want to hit these numbers and the numbers themselves
or derivative of the cause of the
relationshiping involved in the emotional
fit, if you like, that you have with a person in one of these layers.
And one of the implications of that is if you
Got a task.
develop a bit of code for some computer program or a figure out some
processes can allow you to produce a kit
Of the kind that you make and sell to.
the public, maybe it's a service you run if you're a government department.
program for running
street lightings or something like that. It's best to have a very small group.
they will work much faster and much more efficiently. But they need to know each other.
in the sense that they all come from the same background. So one of the things you mustn't do here is go, Oh, we ought to have somebody from
finance and maybe somebody from HR because they'll get sort of
Very upset if they're not included.
And the answer is don't do it. Resist the temptation like crazy.
Because what you want at that
Problem solving thing is for people that don't have to explain everything to each other. So they just know when I say, right, it's what we want to do here.
Everybody goes sure.
Absolutely. They're all on the same page. They all understand.
deep background and the mechanisms and everything else.
Okay, if if it's a financial issue, then you want somebody from finance. Maybe if it's a kind of
H.
type issue, then you want somebody from
human resources.
But don't include people,'Tis the temptation we have.
in organizations, and it should add people from different departments in as as sort of representative, as it were. The answer is don't do it.
There is a place for that.
And that comes further up the scale. And and as you
go further up the scale in terms of
work group size, you go through different functional things. So
The fifteen layer really works much better for blue skies.
Banding ideas about and then
It's much better to have a diverse group of people who are coming at the problem with
different perspectives.
things that another area has already figured out.
being able to sort of look over the parapet and say, Oh,'cause this is what ha this is how science works. Science all a big
Innovations in science have come about by somebody from a completely different discipline usually poking their nose over the parapet and going, Oh, that looks like an interesting problem.
What's it all about? And you explain it to him again. Oh, that's very like what we
I've just solved the problem before.
We know how that works.
Why don't we just apply the same methods or mathematics or whatever it is?
to your problem and it it might work. And very often it does and break a log jab.
And likewise, think about the optimal size of boards.
For example.
It's gonna be one of these numbers. It's probably not going to be below fifteen because you want
Uh really.
wider representation, but
You certainly probably.
Don't want to go above fifty. I looked with horror at the size of the committee for
Climate change.
A hundred and fifty to two hundred, you think. Part of the problem is feeling that you
make a commit contribution if there's only so much speaking time that's available.
Unless you're gonna sit there for a year, by which time, of course, you've forgotten what the first person said.
So you've got to bear in mind that speaking time is very limited.
The issue is
that if you have too big a group, you end up with people who just sit there and get bored and end up looking at their feeds or their emails on their smartphones. And this is exactly what we found during lockdown.
Zoom and teams and
People trying to maintain contact with work group or departmental group or whatever it may be.
So you'd end up
Lots of people.
On a Zoom meeting. And the problem is
Realistically, you can only have four people.
engaged a conversation. So it would just get dominated by
The four people with the loudest voices. And everybody else would
kind of get bored in the background. So they ended up wasting huge time.
You mentioned at the beginning that you were studying
Prime in grooming. And that brings to mind a question about the quality or nature of the time that we spend with the people at these different layers of our social structure.
And I'm sure that time is not created equal, like different activities function for different reasons. And I'm really curious what you've learned about
The way that we spend time.
with each other, what's important, what's surprising, what are some implications at the different layers, like
the things we actually do with each other. What have you learned that's most interesting there?
This really w
Goes back to I mean
is like intimated several times. The layers are created
My
Essentially the amount of time you spend doing stuff.
with different people. So obviously the inner core layer
These layers in your social network have very specific frequencies of interaction you must have to keep the person in that layer. So
The people in your
In a five shoulders to cry on, friends, there.
You have to see at least once a week.
That's the minimum. The people in the fifteen sympathy group lay next outside it, you have to see at least once a month. If you see them less,
those relationships decay.
Inexorably.
takes about three years for somebody to go from being a member of your sympathy group, your 15 sympathy group, to falling out of your 150 and joining the layer of acquaintances, which includes your
Favourite.
Barista that you get your
glass A coffee from every morning on the way to work and that kind of thing. So that's someone I once knew, but I don't have a meaningful relationship with them. I wouldn't invite them and it's very clear that that happens. We can show that actually happening.
with data from
People's networks.
So
You have to invest.
Time.
in relationships.
in proportion to
Essentially the emotional closeness. And it turns out that
emotional closeness of relationship is highly correlated with the time you invest in it.
Question is what are you doing? Well
We just step back a moment to what monkeys and apes are doing. Monkeys and apes spend
a lot of time grooming each other, and it turns out this is how they bond.
Yeah.
relationships, how they create their social bonds, as it were, the intensity of these relationships, which means they'll stick by each other, they won't
Allow one person to drift off into the bush where
they get lost from the rest of the group and these kind of things. They're keeping an eye on
What that's involving
is an awful lot of time spent grooming and and the amount of time spent grooming correlates with the size of the group in primates.
To the extent that some of the most social species who are typically living in group sizes of about fifty individuals are smaller than us, but it's that second
In a layer from the hundred and fifty.
They're spending about
twenty percent of their total
available daytime engaged in this one activity social grooming.
Partly because of the number of individuals they're grooming with, but actually as their group size increasing
They're spending more time grooming.
as a whole, but actually what they're doing is devoting more time to each individual. They're not necessarily agreing with more individuals.
Or at least not.
proportionately more individual.
They're making those relationships more intense.
And the reason that works is grooming triggers the endorphin system by a very specialised
neural system from the skin.
Which we all share.
We have it too.
This system.
responds to light slow stroking only, no other action.
on the skin, it doesn't respond to temperature or pain or anything like that. Just responds to light, slow stroking at around about three centimeters a second, which is the rate during glooming, where they're stroking the fur, parting it.
deforming the skin underneath as it went. This is what's triggering the system up.
If you try stroking someone slower than that.
Or faster than that.
There's no response, but get it right.
and they get an endorphin hit in the brain. Dorphins are part of the brain's pain management system. They give you a kind of opiate like I.
feel very relaxed and calm and
Peace with the world and
trusting is the person you're doing this activity. It's highly specialised.
We use it all the time. Um turns out the inner ear is full of these receptors.
This is why we nod our heads when we're listening to music or dancing.
This is why we rock babies.

If you rock them at
around about three centimeters a second speed.
They calm down.
And go to sleep nicely.
If you try it slower than that, one centimeter a second, or try it faster than that, thirsecond, it has absolutely no effect. They carry on crying.
Relentlessly.
Yeah, so you have to get it absolutely right. So that's the basic mechanism. We've shown that that still works with us.
demonstrably still works with us.
That system underpins the quality of our friendships.
The problem for us is that
And for primates, actually, monkeys and apes is
because it's physical touch.
The intimacy of that.
Limit sits.
capacities. So there's a limit to the number of individuals that you can engage with and build relationships with.
through this mechanism.
And that sets an upper limit on group size, actually, at about fifty.
Animals. So
The problem we had during the course of our more recent evolution as a
If you like trying to increase the size of our groups up to the hundred and fifty we have now.
was how to bond these groups, particularly though, okay, you can go around grooming kind of in a core.
within the fifty layer, but
How do you bond the other hundred people that sit in the
Final hundred and fifty land. The answer is we found lots of ways.
that allows us to trigger the endorphin system directly without involving
physical touch.
And these are
in order of with which they appeared in the course of human evolution
We think
Laughter.
Singing.
Dancing.
And then once language evolved, which was
Probably only with the the appearance of our or least.
fully modern language with our own species two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand years ago.
Lots of things derivative of language, including the rituals of religion.
Feasting.
eating together, drinking particularly alcohol together, stringent type things.
alcoholic type drinks trigger the endorphin system.
Big time.
And lastly telling emotional substories.
Great tragedies.
And we've shared with all of these
That they
trigger the endorphin system and they increase the sense of bonding with the people you actually do the activity with.
So it doesn't change your relationships with people who are your best friends who are not there on the day.
But it does affect.
the quality of the relationship you have with a complete stranger who happens to be there.
And we've shown this with neuromaging experiments.
Pain threshold tests.
with blocker experiments where you're g giving people drugs that block the receptors for endorphins in the brain.
They do the activity but they don't get the hit. In all these cases you can show very nicely that
These peculiar activities, what I call our social tool kit.
work extremely well for bonding large groups and they vary in the size of group that they can bond.
Laughter.
Ironically, as one of the smallest, there is a natural limit on the size of a laughter group at about three, very close to the limit on the size of a conversation. But still three is three times. That means you're bonding.
Three people together.
at the same time, whereas with grooming and physical touch, if you were just to
Strike them.
Physically.
You would only be able to bond one person. So already laughter is three times more efficient. Singing is amazing. We call it the
Icebreaker effect.
community singing around the campfire can turn a group of complete strangers into a group who think they were all all at primary school together.
They're telling them each other their life stories and great secrets and stuff. It's just amazing. Singing works.
Minimally.
uh groups of up to two hundred people we've done it with. And it was showing no sign of tailing off. It's still
The bigger the group, the better the effect. So you can see a lot of these things.
kind of a part and parcel of the things we do every day.
With our friends.
Can I jump to a conclusion that
It's an enormous waste of time to just do like a normal run of course Zoom meeting all day for work.
That Zoom does not create endorphins in the same way that any of the stuff that you've listed.
If relationship drives everything, then
This seems like a giant waste of humanity's time.
I think the answer has to be yes. It can be efficient.
Clearly any of the social media.
including the telephone after all, can be efficient for
processing and
dealing with some
Issues at work.
And particularly when people are not present.
It is
sort of okay for bonding people who already know each other well.
So this is my
We're pretty sure for the reason Facebook was so successful.
Is
That it allowed people
who had now separated just to remember when it was first set up by Zuckerberg and people. You know, these were final year kids at college about to disperse all over the United States. They're big buddies for the last three or four years. And suddenly they would not be able to see them easily. How do you keep in touch?
Here's your answer.
join Facebook and we think it worked very well.
And did because what it's doing was acting like a a sticking plaster. It slowed the rate of decay down by allowing you to keep up with
The person. But we think that
And the general experience seems to be that
If you don't
Need or not.
once in a while face to face, nothing on earth or face.
It's getting to stop.
that friendshially becoming an acquaintancehip. Yeah, it's just somebody I once knew.
Haven't seen him for years, don't really know what they're doing.
Check their feeds now and again, but I don't
Waste a lot of time.
So there's something about face to face interactions that's very important and
The world of business is a village.
Works best. It works like a village where everybody knows each other.
So if
As a default.
The only way you've got.
For people to meet up.
is online.
that will kinda do, but it's a bit clunky and it's difficult to see.
whether it would
In the long run.
What?
terribly efficiently because you're not able to do all the kinds of casual things we would do with people.
Certainly with our friendship circles, but we do with people at work.
We laugh at them, we have lunch with them, we
Go out for a beer with them, we
Tell them all um you know, troubles them off.
Lives and
There are rituals as the
analog as it were of how religion works.
Any organization.
has its own internal rituals that it does in some form.
But if you're in Japanese industry until about twenty years ago, everybody stood by their desks in the morning and did
Calisthenics.
But ten minutes.
And I'm absolutely convinced this is why the Japanese car industry
ended up being so successful. They've lost their way a bit. But we we used to kind of
Looking at well Japanese
Car companies that everybody's doing gymnastics.
and Tai Chi type things i in the car park before they went into it and say, Ha ha ha, you know.
Well, I think laughing was on their side of the face, not our side of the face. Because that made them feel very bonded and committed to the company.
And that was
Real
symptom, if you like, of Japanese industry at that time when they were peaking in their
Productivity is is that every worker from the big boss at the top to the
Person who swept the
So
They belonged to company had this expression, I am a company man.
Meaning
This is my life and my commitment.
And I think that had a lot to do with these things because what these exercises have been doing is triggering the endorphin system, making them feel very cool, calm and collected and at peace.
with the fellow workers and with the company in general. So
These mechanisms kind of play a role
But it's underneath and I think
So it's sort of going on below the surface of consciousness. And I think in our haste to
Find deficiencies. We've forgotten the lessons actually of the founders, the entrepreneurs who founded the big
multinationals of today.
back in Victorian Edwardian times 150 years ago because they all recognized
That
A
Bonded workforce.
Happy workforce.
was highly beneficial in terms of productivity.
So they did things like
Building social clubs on every factory.
Campus.
Famously.
The famous ones were the railway clubs. They started here in Britain.
Lots of railways before everybody else did.
And every
railway station had a railway club and everywhere in the empire that we built railways there was a railway club.
Everybody who worked at the station was automatically a member of the railway club. It's Railway Club.
They would have social events and dances and there would always be tennis courts'cause
We're talking about the eighteen nineties up through the nineteen thirties, maybe.
Everybody played tennis. It's the kind of the fashion and everybody loved it.
I'm sure it had a lot to do with why some of these companies were successful. But I think what's happened
sort of post the second world war.
The accountants are looking for ways of reducing costs and stuff. Those kind of social things are being thrown out.
of the window as well, you can't put them in an an income and expenditure letter very easily.
What does it mean? What's your output? How do you measure that? So
We're not interested in. We're just interested in the things that we can show in a
an Excel sheet to have a direct effect on profit lines.
And I think probably we might
Just to consider taking a leaf out of their book again, going, Well
What are the things that we're going to do?
people would like to do now. Because obviously life is different. You've got to sit back and think, Well, what would work what would attract people come in so that
You
Provide them with the opportunity
To meet
in a casual social context, people from different parts of the company and build those kind of cross
Departmental.
Links that allow the things to happen.

efficient on the bigger scale, rather than just everybody getting into their silos within their own little department or
Group.
There are a number of cases where this has been done and done very successfully. It's not a case that
Nobody does it.
modern companies today are doing it very, very
Effectively, I I gather was
Facebook has a regular Wednesday
Beer and barbecue.
event in the sort of space in the center of the
campuses, as it were, where people just turn up and have a beer and
Burger and stuff and talk to people.
Not that complicated. It's not complicated. Don't have a full friend. You might even sign some nice person in
Finance that you get on really well.
Instead of thinking of them.
There's Ogues.
Yeah.
You know, we give several examples.
One was
Just founding a choir and it's back to this magic of singing.
case for a a government department.
set up a choir that they decide amongst themselves to do it and eventually it
Change the atmosphere.
within the department from a very, very frosty one, which was very fraught because of its history.
into a very
much bonded and efficient working group through just once a week they sanctice in a in a seminar room somewhere. And eventually they ended up a whole lot of them competing in choir competitions and things like that. Or
Big.
Brewing giant SAB's South African breweries and bought
Miller of Miller light fame, the American Brews. They've since combined with A and Bev.
The big
Dutch, I think.
Brewing giant. Something like
I don't know, one in every
Eight
Beers poured anywhere in the world is brewed by them.

Huge, huge.
Come.
But when they first started up, they had the idea of putting a a little pub.
In the entrance for of all the factory buildings. So people just called in for a beer.
Only way home.
from work, you know, at the end of the day. And Sam, my co author who work for them.
Twenty years on.
Some of the Facebook friendship groups that were set up.
from those casual
Bears off, but I'm still going.
even though these people most of these people no longer work for SA Battered all over the world. But the friendships that were built up out
Still going strong. And of course what's gonna happen sooner or later in this
Big world of ours.
you all bump into these same people somewhere else in another company, or your company will be
trying to make some arrangement with the company they work from and oh hello.
Good to see you again. Just makes everything go smoother.
Can you explain the concept of
Homophily.
This is the
secret ingredient really for friendship. So it was first discovered by sociologists about
Fifteen, twenty years ago.
And they noticed that people tended to hang out with
People who had very similar kinds of interests.
So
friends tended to have same political views
They tend to have same religious views, these kind of things.
And since then there's been more and more
evidence, in fact, shed loads of evidence showing
This effect is extremely strong.
And
We asked people to fill in big questionnaires.
About
What they shared with
their friends in terms of Morpholi and did some
number crunching and it reduced it really to about seven.
key dimensions, which we call the seven pillars of friendship.
So like a sort of
supermarket barcode of who you are as a person, the community you essentially belong to. But it's what you
Speak rather than who you are.
Biologically, if you like.
It's the cultural.
Elements.
to define you.
It turns out that
These have a very, very strong effect.
On the people we have in our layers.
If you look at feel closest to the people in your
in a five shoulders to cry on friendship group.
you will share six or seven of these dimensions with them. So they're things like
Sharing the same language.
'Cause that
Rather crucial'cause it's all about talking to each other.
But also
Where did you grow up?
Where did you learn what it is to be a member of the community? What's your career trajectory been? What are your hobbies and interests? What are your
moral and political and religious views, what is your preferred musical taste?
What's your sense of humor?
So the more of these boxes you tick with somebody, the closer in they will be in your inner circles.
And the more intense and the longer those relationships.
Lost.
In addition to that.
These are
what you might think as the cultural component
In the end is much. But we share
homophily with our friends on a lot of other fixed
traits that we can't do anything about. So gender is a very, very strong one. Seventy five percent of men's social circles, the hundred and fifty are males.
Seventy five percent of women's
Social circles.
Oh as a women.
Other twenty five percent in each case is family.
And I guess you
don't have a lot of choice about that. Opposite sex. Twenty-five percent. But there's very, very strong gendered effect to social networks and somehow feel more comfortable.
Working around.
People of our own gender.
Age has a very strong effect. All our friends and preferred family members that we give most time to tend to be around.
All age.
Personality again, introverts tend to prefer.
being friends to the introverts, extroverts tend to prefer to be friends to the extroverts. And a lot of these really
are about allowing
you should come to compromises easily because the big problem is
Just think of it in terms of extroverts and introverts.
Saturday evening.
You've got a choice. You can either go clubbing or you can stay in and watch a movie on the TV with a
Takeaway dinner.
Two introverts that both want to stay in and watch th this is Nirvana.
But
You got two extroverts who want to go clubbing. This is another kind of nevada.
But
The last option is you've got one of each, an introvert wants to stay and an extrovert who wants to go clubbing. And now you've got a problem.
There's a negotiation that has to go on and somebody has to give way.
Which means you've either got to sort of agree to alternate, in which case half the time you're bored silly,'cause you'd rather be doing the other thing.
But you're sacrificing yourself on the altar of love or
But it's still stressing the relationship, stressing the friendship. So you can see very quickly.
that that applies to all these things. So
this whole problem really of just engineering
The smoothness
And reducing the friction.
involved in relationships that
The long lasting.
becomes very important.
And you can see why homophily then becomes born, because the more things you have in common
the fewer occasions you're going to disagree about what
Yeah.
the fewer occasions you are going to be
Left.
Stranded.
and unable to think of anything to talk about.
She's a problem you have with a stranger. What do I say now?
Well, with somebody who you are well gelled with.
That's less likely to happen because you
got the same interests, but also you kinda don't mind if there are
silent periods. You could have it just sit there and
Together.
So facilitating the kind of flow
of the relationship becomes important. And at the end of the day, that feeds into the world of work because if two people get on
they're much more likely to work efficiently together to do each other favours, then favours need to be done rather than saying, Oh, come on, you know.
We got enough problems that
trying to solve at our end of the business. You deal with yours.
So homophily plays a very, very important role.
And it really
strongly underprins our friendship. We just do, for better or for worse. But at the end of the day
It does mean you end up in silos. So it's what pushes us to be in silos and echo chambers is the problem.
And that's the problem with scale. You know, in a small village
You don't have
the freedom to go off and talk with the fifty people who are all interested in shooting ducks.
There aren't that many people in the village who actually enjoy shooting ducks, just statistically. So you end up having to talk to people
We like doing other activities. So you end up
In a small
Business.
A small organization or a small village.
having a much more integrated, diverse
Social.
life, if you like, social network. And the bigger
Life becomes the bigger the city, the bigger the organization, the easier it is for silos to form, which is the big problem.
Yeah.
large multinationals have as they build up.
These thus versus them.
internal structures.
And the problem we have
Both in everyday life, I guess. But also in particular in
Organizational.
structures and business and so on.
is how to break those down. So you have to kind of think of ways of
Overcoming the homophily effect.
Tomophily is very good for certain things. Back to what I said earlier.
It's a small group.
with a focus on a specific task that needs to get done.
Then they all need to be
I'm off for it.
Think the same way, know the same stuff, come from the same area.
But you kinda don't want that.
Probably on your
Management board.
Because you want some diversity of input up there.
You gotta find ways of breaking down the homophilus effect.
At the right level.
Don't destroy it at the bottom.
Or you'll lose everything, right? It's important. It really is important.
But at the same time.
You need to be able to introduce diversity in the right levels and the right places. But it goes back, I think.
to this point I made about the Japanese car industry in this sense of
I belong to the company.
I am a company man.
It's creating this sense of
being a member of the village. I may be a very humble member of the village. All I do is sweep the odd outside. But I play my bit.
So it's not easy.
And there are no silver bullets.
I'm so fascinated that I think in your research you show sixty percent of people's time they spend with
Maybe forty percent with the closest five and another twenty with the next ten. Time.
It just strikes me is the resource. It's the resource that we have to allocate thoughtfully and build in those groups.
Time's the only way to do it.
Conversation and activity. Yeah.
Yeah.
This has kind of implications for
management because
You can't create time.
It is fixed. There is a limit, and you have to do stuff like sleep.
And the problem that
Most CEOs and the like.
senior management get into is that
End up trying to do too much.
And they don't have the night to do it. So they're trying to be
Engaging with everybody.
in a large company from the shop floor worker to the chief finance officer and so on.
And you can't do it. Um, certainly you want to engage and be seen to be engaged.
with your workforce not stuck away in some C suite at the top of the
How?
But on the other hand, you've got to m find some way of managing your time better. And what you don't want to be doing is wasting time on micromanagement.
You have to be able to trust the layers below you, the management layers below you, to do their job.
while you concentrate at the top of the pyramid on the kind of strategic stuff and seem to be the charismatic leader, if you like.
Trust is so important.
It's a word we haven't said much about, but
So much of this is just establishment and maintenance of trust.
Trust is what
Creates and maintains
our relationships with each other.
When things fall apart it's always because trust has broken down.
I'd love to ask about
a couple big secular trends like in humanity and how it affects all this. So
The ones that come to mind are
Technology, the rise of all sorts of technology.
We're talking not long after the Apple Vision Pro comes out or there's always something new that seems
Important for how we spend our time.
The second is the secular decline in religious beliefs. Maybe that's changing a little bit very recently, but over the long term it's been in decline.
And then the last one is the rise of psychological mental health problems, you know, unhappiness, mental disorders, et cetera. These seem like three important trends.
related to your ideas. You can pick one or all of them.
And I'm just really curious to hear your reaction to those three big trends.
They're all important.
And maybe they're all interrelated actually, but the last one that you
mentioned.
in some ways is perhaps the most worrying one. This is this
tsunami of loneliness that sort of seems to have it as it was first noted.
Way back in the nineties.
thirty years ago started to
Show up.
And a lot of this is
Basically.
Young graduates going away to their first job in the big city, so up till then your social world has been made for you.
By home, by university, college, calls of residence, these kind of things. You don't have to sort of
Do much in the way of going out finding.
Then you go off your first job.
the big city in New York or somewhere and
You don't know anybody, you don't know where to go to meet people, and especially you don't know where to go that's safe to meet people.
And to meet people with similar interests of yours to narrow it down even further.
But the only people you know are the people at work. And of course
Five o'clock.
They've all got things to do'cause they've already got
Sounds like they got families.
Yeah, stuck on your own. And this seems to
just got worse and worse and worse and
triggered collapse into depression and indeed physical illness and
Because this is all related to the thing.
I mentioned right at the beginning that the best predictor of your mental health and well being and your physical health and well being.
Is the number of close friends you have, and those close friends need to be there. It's no good having them.
at the end of a telephone line or a computer screen the other side of the country, they've gotta be
on the block with you so you can at least walk around.
knock on the door and say I feel like rubbish.
Can you come out and at least have a coffee or something? Let's go for a walk in the park.
Or something.
You have to have that kind of physical contact. So this has been a big problem and I think the issue
Sort of in the process of overwhelming most
organizations and businesses, they're losing huge quantities of time or work.
with people taking time off work. So it's becoming more inefficient. It's putting much bigger load on everybody else in the office.
whatever it is, because they're now having to do not only
their share of the work, but the share of the work that you're not able to do because you're all sick.
So they were getting very worried and
investing huge quantities of money in sort of well being.
And the answer is
It's expensive stuff. All you need to do is to find friends for people.
And you find friends with people by providing them with the opportunity, the place to go.
To meet.
'Cause friendships are organic. You can't force people to be friends. All you can do is provide the opportunity and the space and
Hope that they they do it.
We're so intensely social.
Given the opportunity.
We will do it.
You can do that.
Very nearly for free. Just put on it.
Quiet.
for people to go and sing they'll come.
You don't need anybody.
Yeah.
You could even just put up some biscuits and coffee.
a negligible amount.
Compared to what you'd be paying for a sort of well being trainer or something.
So those sort of things.
are things we really have to look at. Now in in the past
I think a lot of those
support networks would have been provided by religion. There's no question in my mind that that's really what the key benefit of religion.
has been for most societies.
doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not, it's the activities they do and the kind of context they provide.
'Cause all the activities are just the sort of thing that kick in the endorphin system and make you feel good.
And make you feel very bonded to the community, you know. Him singing.
Not too.
Painful stories in the form of sermons and stuff that rouse your emotions.
kneeling and standing and occasionally
Stretching yourself out on the ground and
All these kind of things that are part of this social toolkit.
And of course you don't have that.
You're losing
somewhat of the skeleton that has kept communities together in the past.
The problem is religion is strange stuff, so
You might well think that the world is better off without religions because they have this
dreadful tendency to end up fighting each other.
The great problem is nothing comes for free in life or biology. Nothing is there's no such place as Nirvana.
There's a downside to everything. So you have to balance the upsides and the downsides to these things.
And in some sense, I suppose.
the internet then has become a little bit of a substitute in a way.
It is very weird stuff, but it is compelling.
Go online.
to look something up. You just want a tiny bit of information.
For something you're doing.
If something else
turns up in the feeding Oh that looks interesting.
Oh there's a video there of my favourite
pop song from forty years ago. I've just must look at that.

And you end up spending the whole evening
online it's very, very engaging. And it probably does trigger a certain sort of bonding. My worry with it, though, is that
You're bonding with something in your head, not with something in the real world.
And the problem here is
precisely that in real life. You might start off in real life by being introduced to somebody
by a friend or a relative or something.
Which is how we used to eat meat most people. But you would

Get to know them face to face.
And so you'd have a kind of ground truthing that went on where you would kind of evaluate
Despite all the things they say.
Is it really true? Does it mean it?
We get a lot of cues.
from people's facial expressions on how honest they're being. Of course what happens on
dating scams or any other financial scams, any of these things is they're very careful not to meet up. They're very careful not to
Meet up online.
visually and video.
So you can't see what they actually look like.
You can't see what the cues of trustworthiness on their face is like when they're talking to you.
So what you're doing is you're building a a kind of
Avatar in your mind. Now this is what we do anyway when we
create a friendship when we create a romantic relationship.
What we've initially do is build an avatar in our heads as to who this
Wonderful person is.
But meeting them face to face allows you to sort of knock the rough edges off a bit a little bit and get to know their inner core better.

And that's the danger.
of the internet, I think, is that it just lacks this
capacity to be able to sit across the table
in a pub or a cafe or a restaurant and stare into the whites of the other person's eyes and reach across the table and
Pat them on the shoulder or something, but
gives you this sense of who they really are and how honest they really are. So I
I've often said
You want to know how much somebody actually feels about you.
Friend or romantic partner, whatever it may be, a family member, doesn't matter, how they really feel about you. Ignore everything they say.
Because words are weasely things and we can misuse them.
And misunderstand them.
Just check how they touch you.
Because that is actually the best.
A touch is worth a thousand words any day in this context.
You can't lie about
how you touch somebody and we're very, very good at
recognizing when a touch is meaningful and when it's false.
If you think about
everything you've studied across your life so much. You've been a prolific writer and researcher.
If you set aside the social brain
research and homophily and things like that.
What idea or ideas do you find the most
Energizing or interesting.
Across your whole
career of study.
Is actually time.
In many ways, time was the beginning of all this stuff.
Having worked on the
Monkeys and antelope.
In
Africa and Europe in the wild.
You begin to realise that what's limiting for animals
Is not
Necessarily food. In fact.
Ecologists tend to look at
The way the world works in terms of food.
Availability. So
Population die out because there isn't enough food.
In the extreme case, that's probably true.
But we're talking about the demise of the dinosaurs when everybody dies because
Everything's been destroyed.
By some
Comment coming in or
Everything's got polluted, so there's no oxygen in the seas, whatever it may be.
In the normal course of things, it's not food that really limits them.
No matter how bad your quality of your food is, the vegetation or it may be.
If you had infinite time.
You can get all the food you needed.
What you don't have is infinite time. You have to get
The food you need to keep yourself alive.
in within a certain period of time. That's usually a day, obviously.
So you got it.
Keep easy.
Small birds and mammals.
literally keel over and die if they don't eat their body weight food a day.
Particularly in cold climates in the winter.
So it's really time that's the problem they have.
And that got expanded from the world of animals. There's all sorts of implications for things like conservation and stuff as well.
It was the starting point of looking at humans and going, actually
We don't have infinite time.
And a lot of the things we do are attempts to cut through time constraints.
fascinating application of the ideas. Robin, thanks for doing this. I've so appreciated everything you've written and sharing so much here with us today. I learned so much. Thank you so much for your time.

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