Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
02
Mar
2010
Beyond the Dunbar Number: Picking Dunbar’s Brain
Kinship vs. friendship, the cognitive demands of monogamy, or why 400 Facebook friends may be a health hazard.
In 1992, anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar proposed Dunbar’s Number — a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of people with whom we can maintain viable social relationships. He pinned that number at 148, or roughly 150. But how does this translate to today’s social media environment of 400-friend Facebook profiles — does it help us beat Dunbar’s number?
We asked the iconic British social anthropologist himself, who addresses the issue further in his new book, How Many Friends Does One Person Need? — we highly recommend it.
The amount of time we invest in a relationship is proportionate to its quality. Face-to-face relationships are simply unmatched by online ones. “A touch is worth a 1000 words any day,” says Dunbar. But what online relationships are good for is to stall the decay of a relationship.
If you don’t go to the pub sooner or later, it will die.” ~ Dunbar
But what of all those huge numbers of online friends, aren’t they worth something? Perhaps kinship. The difference between friendship and kinship is that kin won’t fall apart with time and distance, “you can abuse your kin and they’ll still come,” says Dunbar.
Dunbar argues that having lots of kin means having fewer friends. Imagine your time-budget devoted to relationships as a pie. When you start handing out slices of your time to your friends, if too many people crowd around, no one gets a proper slice. Kinship is more about similar social groups, interests, geographical locations, whereas a friend, defined by Dunbar, is a person you can have a personal reciprocated relationship where you are willing to do each other favors.
Have humans always been able to handle 150 personal relationships? Dunbar explains that our brains have grown over time to handle our more complex relationships. The most taxing on our brain is the romantic kind (monogamous). Pair-bonded species have unusually big brains to do all the work.
Romance is very hard work and extremely costing to maintain.” ~ Dunbar
Will our brains continue to evolve to accommodate this hyper-connectivity? The brain accounts for only 2 percent of your total body weight, but uses 20 percent of your daily energy.
Hold on, someone just tweeted me…
Filip Matous hosts a pop-philosophy video show at standstrong.tv. He currently lives in London and is always seeking to find the next interesting person to interview.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
11
Dec
2009
The Color of Gender
How political correctness resulted in enforcing a universal, cross-cultural gender stereotype.
When cultural anthropology, psychology and photographic ingenuity converge, it’s a fascinating thing. And that’s exactly what South Korean visual artist JeongMee Yoon has been doing since 2005 in her thesis work, The Pink and Blue Projects.
Inspired by her own daughter’s obsession with the color pink, Yoon’s project explores the color preferences of children and their parents across different cultures and ethnic groups, probing into gender identity as a socialized construct.
Yoon found that girls’ preference for pink and boys’ for blue was universal and widespread, powered by pervasive advertising and media messaging intentionally targeting each gender of children with the respective color.
Yoon’s historical research, however, unearthed some curious findings indicating this wasn’t always the case:
Pink was once a color associated with masculinity, considered to be a watered down red and held the power associated with that color. In 1914, The Sunday Sentinel, an American newspaper, advised mothers to ‘use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.’ The change to pink for girls and blue for boys happened in America and elsewhere only after World War II.
The switch happened as twentieth-century political correctness took root and, in an effort to promote gender equality, the colors began being used with the opposite genders. This trend was so purposeful and explicit that it ended up overcompensating for the superficial connections attached to the symbolism of each color, not eradicating them but merely reversing their direction on the gender spectrum.
To illustrate these excessive and culturally manipulated expressions of femininity and masculinity, Yoon photographs children in their rooms, surrounded by their belongings in pink of blue on a background of the respective color.
The photographic style reminds us of Andrzej Kramarz’s Things series, inspired by the horror vacui style of Eastern European folk art, with a hint of fellow South Korean photographer Yeondoo Jung’s Wonderland series, also dealing with the whimsical and colorful world of children.
Explore The Pink and Blue Projects for a fascinating look inside the cross-cultural gender identity incubator of socially enforced symbolism.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
Help
Brain Pickings takes 200+ hours a month to curate and edit. If you find any joy and value in it, we would really appreciate a modest donation.
Subscribe
Connect