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arXiv:1105.5170physics.soc-ph

Validation of Dunbar's number in Twitter conversations

Bruno Goncalves, Nicola Perra, Alessandro Vespignani

Abstract

Modern society's increasing dependency on online tools for both work and recreation opens up unique opportunities for the study of social interactions. A large survey of online exchanges or conversations on Twitter, collected across six months involving 1.7 million individuals is presented here. We test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar's number. We find that users can entertain a maximum of 100-200 stable relationships in support for Dunbar's prediction. The "economy of attention" is limited in the online world by cognitive and biological constraints as predicted by Dunbar's theory. Inspired by this empirical evidence we propose a simple dynamical mechanism, based on finite priority queuing and time resources, that reproduces the observed social behavior.

arXiv comments
8 pages, 6 figures
Journal reference
PLoS ONE 6(8): e22656 (2011)
DOI
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022656
Subjects
physics.soc-phPhysics and Society cond-mat.otherOther Condensed Matter cs.HCHuman-Computer Interaction cs.SISocial and Information Networks

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Linked by 2 identifiable commenters in 3 comments across 2 threads, from Apr 2022 to Oct 2022. Found in 2 HN submissions from May 2011 to Jun 2011. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments2 threads

  1. The 'attention economy' corrupts science 1 comment

    • "Large group" could be as small as 200 or 300, or perhaps as low as 151. A website operator who wants to publish pages managed and edited by 150 of his "friends" would be acceptable. A website operator who wants to hand out pages to 100,000 people would not be acceptable.…

      1vuio0pswjnm7View on HNParent context

  2. Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas 2 comments

    • I worked on verifying Dunbar's number a few years back using social media data from tens of millions of users: https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170 The main operational idea is that we have a finite capacity for interactions so that if we try to create too many interactions, they'll…

      Anon84View on HNParent context

    • I worked on verifying Dunbar's number a few years back using social media data from tens of millions of users: https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170 The main operational idea is that we have a finite capacity for interactions so that if we try to create too many interactions, they'll…

      Anon84View on HNParent context

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