Dunbar’s Number

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has become famous for what is known as Dunbar’s number: the number of meaningful relationships that humans can have is about 150. Further research has expanded upon this original research by looking at the emotional closeness between people, and led to the idea known as Dunbar layers: that an individual’s group of 150 is subdivided into layers based on closeness. Most people have 5 people in the closest layer, another 10 in the next layer, another 35 in the next layer, and an additional 100 in the final layer. This worksheet is part of our community workshop.