Dunbar's Number: Pt 2 - Age

<p>Robin Dunbar did an interview to coincide with his new book, and there are surprising depths to Dunbar's Number that isn't normally picked up by commentators.</p><p>Audio source: <a href="https://play.acast.com/s/intelligencesquared/thescienceoffriendship-withrobindunbarandhelenczerski">https://play.acast.com/s/intelligencesquared/thescienceoffriendship-withrobindunbarandhelenczerski</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1381628282311901187">Share this clip on Twitter!</a></p><p><strong>swyx: </strong>[00:00:00] Something I also learned about the Dunbar number is that it's very tied to age. We don't always stay at. 150, we start with about one or two wishes, our parents then we get to about five with our closest friends. Then in our twenties and thirties, we  overshoot and go to about 200, 250 people. By our thirties that drops to 150. And then into our sixties and seventies, it continues to decline. And there's an age related dynamic to this which i didn't really appreciate</p><p><strong>Helen Czerski: </strong>[00:00:30] Albert wants to know about the correlation between age and the ability to form friendships. And what's, why is there a connection between age and new friendships? And he also, I assume it's, he says at the end, I've personally found there to be a negative correlation which is. Diplomatic, I guess.</p><p><strong>Robin Dunbar: </strong>[00:00:47] Yeah. So I used to getting very close to home to what happens to be age. Yes. So actually you can think of this really as a sort of arc that you start out at birth and it's an arc, which involves the circles. So we do seem to acquire the circles of friendship as complete circles, as it were over time and correspondingly, we lose them as we age, but th the arc looks something like this.</p><p>You start out. With as in a core of about one and a half there, obviously your parents, as it were by about five, you can reach the five threshold. And then as you age, you can accrete the various layers as your social and cognitive skills de