Robin Dunbar on why we have friends
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Maintaining friendships is one of the most cognitively demanding things we do, according to Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar. So why do we bother? Robin has spent his life trying to answer this deceptively simple question. For most of his twenties, he lived with a herd of five hundred gelada monkeys in the Ethiopian highlands. He studied their social behaviour and concluded that an ability to get on with each other was just as important as finding food, for the survival of the species. Animals that live in large groups are less likely to get eaten by predators. When funding for animal studies dried up in the 1980s, he turned his attention to humans. and discovered there’s an upper limit to the number of real friends we can have, both in the real world and on social media. Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:40.1 | Hello I'm Jim Alkalele. This podcast of The Life Scientific is all about friends. |
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| 0:52.0 | Robin Dunbar has spent most of his life trying to answer a deceptively |
| 0:56.0 | simple question. Why do humans and other primates invest quite so much time and |
| 1:02.1 | mental effort on their social lives. |
| 1:04.4 | How and why did we evolve to be such a sociable species? |
| 1:07.8 | He spent six years together with his wife living with 500 Gilada monkeys in a remote region of the Ethiopian |
| 1:15.1 | Highlands. Observing their social life was like watching the most exciting soap |
| 1:19.4 | opera, he says. When funding for field work dried up he turned his attention to humans who |
| 1:25.0 | could be studied in the local park. He's perhaps best known for Dunbar's number, |
| 1:30.3 | the idea that there's an upper limit to the number of meaningful social |
| 1:34.2 | relationships we can maintain. An idea which seems to hold true on social media as |
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