Dunbar's number

Type: Concept

As of November 2026, Dunbar's number has been mentioned in one podcast episode on The Proven Podcast (Oct 2025).

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he prop