I read: four ot of five thinks cheating on taxes is immoral or a moral issue, a whopping nine in ten feels the same about cheating on a spouse. Pretty good scores.

TMoW has a good point. Given that "most" just means "more than half," the imminent tension implied by your "While" never really materializes.

Not mine, see: www.livescience.com/14152-destructive-human-behaviors-bad-habits.html

Word.

"Here's how Oxford primatologist Robin Dunbar sees it: Baboons groom each other to keep social ties strong. But we humans are more evolved, so we use gossip as social glue."

Sometimes I wonder if these people have actually had any social experiences at all in life. Is there a secret research psychologist breeding lab the government runs somewhere? It would explain so much.

@smeck: Robin Dunbar is great, i've read his book 'how many friends does one person need?' (the answer is 150, well 150 +/-20) but while it is actually hard to study human behaviour, we're getting better at it.

Lol, "Smeck". I'm going to call semck83 that from now on.

Well then I am woefully short on friends I guess, unless you count the folks here, but I consider you all friendly targets or acquaintances at best. :-) But seriously, I have maybe a half dozen true friends, a couple dozen former and current coworkers, a dozen or so people from church (mostly fellow choir members), and a few former classmates I consider friends. A total of maybe 40 people.

Orathaic,

We are not going to learn anything about human behavior through drivel-laden pseudoscience like the above. Of course, the man's book may be another thing entirely -- I don't know, not having read it. But he should discipline his public statements better. (It's also possible the journalist just made him sound foolish when he didn't. That definitely happens a lot in science journalism).

@draug, perhaps i should clarify. This number includes all acquaintances.

The estimate is that this is the maximum number of people you can have with your social network (at any one time) That you can only keep track of all the social status, inter-relationships and histories or 150 people.

The supporting evidence is how corporations tend to avoid having departments with more than 150 employees (over that size it becomes more efficient to split a department in two, or divide responsibilities into teams...)

And Amish villages - which self-police through peer-pressure. The theory being that it becomes much harder to self-police like this once your village grows over 150 people because the individuals will more easily get away with things when they are not known by everyone - in practice they split villages into two when the are reaching that size.

For friends, the average is 4 (+/- 1) close friends, and then something like 15 friends, 45 acquaintances, and 90 vaguely known people... (rough numbers certainly)

And that over time individuals will move from these different circles of relatedness (with family tending to stay as close as they are throughout your life)

@semck, I will admit that this science is hard to do, that does not make it pseudoscience, just difficult. I would like to further clarify, I admire Dunbar because of his writing style, the interesting ideas he presented in his book. It is entirely possible that as new evidence comes to light these ideas will need to be revised. They largely come from the discipline of evolutionary psychology, which is built on rather shaky foundations... But I fail to see what your major issue with the above journalism is.

orathaic,

No, it's pseudoscience. Let's consider the quote again:

"Baboons groom each other to keep social ties strong. But we humans are more evolved, so we use gossip as social glue."

The question being addressed is apparently, "Why do we gossip?" One might question whether this is a scientific question in the first place, but let's leave aside such concerns. Here is the answer, known to anybody who has participated in gossip: we are naturally curious about the lives and behaviors of others. We like stories, and we especially like dramatic twists in stories. So, we like hearing gossip. That means we also like telling gossip, because we're giving the recipient something they want, which gives us a sense of prestige and power, which is also something we desire. Sometimes, we gossip because we actually want to hurt the object of the gossip, instead of merely being indifferent to it. In that case, we're taking advantage of the recipient's natural curiosity to achieve our own malfeasant ends.

And that's why we gossip. Notice that it can be explained in terms of other desires and drives: the desire for stories and information about other people (which applies in many contexts other than gossip, as well), the desire for power and prestige (which also applies in many contexts other than gossip).

What is silly, then, is to analyze it in a context by itself, as though it is a discrete, isolated behavior with its own special causes unrelated to other human desires and drives. And this is what behavior psychologists of this type (yes, mostly evolutionary psychologists) do routinely. They take a behavior and try to explain it absolutely in isolation, as though it might have evolved all on its own, only rarely considering whether it might be a natural byproduct of other behaviors that had their own causes.

Gossip, we are told, exists to act "as social glue." Well, there are a couple ways to take that. First, you could say that that's just another way of saying what I just said: people do it to gain prestige, drawing other people to them, tightening connections of others to them. In that case, it's not a novel statement -- it's just a restatement of what we've already known, rephrased in scientific language so that people who tell themselves they only believe scientific results can understand it just like everybody else does.

Alternatively, it might be interpreted to mean that gossip exists as an independently selected behavior, independent of other drives, because it acts as a kind of fiat social glue through genetic preprogramming. Not only is this silly, it's also untestable, and therefore pseudoscience.

Even the simpler and seemingly more scientific question, "Is gossip an adaptive behavior?" can't really be analyzed well at this level -- you'd have to figure out what other behaviors it was a conasequence of, and then ask whether whatever negative effects it had were worse than the positive effects of THOSE behaviors (such as, say, the interest in other people's lives). Little of which is attempted, and most of which would remain untestable anyway. So what we get instead is people like Robin Dunbar weaving interesting and credible and completely pseudoscientific accounts about where behaviors like gossip come from -- accounts that add no actual knowledge to the human store.

"The supporting evidence is how corporations tend to avoid having departments with more than 150 employees...."

That doesn't really make sense. If corporations are going to optimize their departments based on how many people the average person can "know" in the sense of "keep track of most of the details of their lives," then they would have to make them somewhat smaller than the actual number, because everybody who works at a corporation also knows people outside the corporation. Of course it's also true that people in a corporation rarely keep track of all the details of the lives (even the corporate lives) of all the other people in even their department.

Moreover, the connection between the optimally efficient size of a team to get something done and the number of people whose lives you can keep track of is a little obscure, I think.

I do think there's something to the overall argument that we can't know hundreds of people very well, though I think a lot of this is related to the time scales of our lives, and the amount of time it takes to know somebody well. Needless to say, I haven't done any of the relevant compuations, though, so that remains an intuition.

"Gossip, we are told, exists to act "as social glue." Well, there are a couple ways to take that. First, you could say that that's just another way of saying what I just said: people do it to gain prestige, drawing other people to them, tightening connections of others to them. In that case, it's not a novel statement -- it's just a restatement of what we've already known, rephrased in scientific language so that people who tell themselves they only believe scientific results can understand it just like everybody else does.

Alternatively, it might be interpreted to mean that gossip exists as an independently selected behavior, independent of other drives, because it acts as a kind of fiat social glue through genetic preprogramming. Not only is this silly, it's also untestable, and therefore pseudoscience."

Ok, as a restatement of what you said, then this may be a useful insight into the behaviour. It may be used to generalise and compare/contrast with other species or form a deeper understanding of pathologies. Thus I would argue that re-stating in evolutionary terms is NOT useless, but informative (or at least potentially so)

Second, testability is not the problem a lot of ideas start out as untestable, they should, however, give rise to predictions - like how another species will behave.

Lastly, the line "we humans are more evolved" is a perfect example of a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory - the misconception which the author displays here is one which betrays his lack of scientific credentials, more-so than any of the journalism he may have done in reporting/investigating evo-psych. I admit i only noticed it in your quote, but it annoys me greatly.

The relationship with corporation department size is an interesting one.

I do acknowledge your point though, as I said 'at one time' - i don't know if that means you can go to work and at that time know all 150 people (but only partially, because you don't need to know their personal lives, only the professional relationships between them)

However, I like the idea that corporations came to this optimal team size on their own, and this is a post-hoc explanation.

The amount of time it takes to get to know someone well, and the amount of time it takes for someone you once knew well to drift away and become a different person... there is some limit on the amount of time you have to spend with individuals, and spending time with group does not always allow the same level of 'getting to know'... (

Though, of course, it is possible to build groups, and form strong bonds and group identities, i think behaviour within such a group subsumes the individual... and this raises the question of what it is like to get to know a group rather than an individual (like in a corporation, you might know the 'sales department' based on stereotypes and common attitudes... thus you could imagine that level of knowing taking up 1 person's worth of your brain - though that's just a first-order approximation.

Actually, anecdotally I think i do categorise people who i know based on traits, and sometimes i mix up which one i've told a given story too... perhaps a similar phenomena to parents calling a child by all the other names of their children before getting the right one. (I may perhaps digress, but you're offering some interesting digressions, so i will not apologise)

Thanks for the interesting post.

"Ok, as a restatement of what you said, then this may be a useful insight into the behaviour. It may be used to generalise and compare/contrast with other species or form a deeper understanding of pathologies. Thus I would argue that re-stating in evolutionary terms is NOT useless, but informative (or at least potentially so) "

Eh, maybe, but I'm not convinced. First of all, it's far too much just what people have always done, comparing our behavior to animals. Of course, it has always had its place, but I want to be wary against raising it to a higher position now just because it's somebody in a science department that does it. Just look at all the animal-derived metaphors and similes in our language for examples of what I'm talking about.

Second, one must remember that our understanding of the other species is very anthropomorphic already in the first place. "Social glue" was a human term before it was a chimpanzee term, so we're already putting their behavior into familiar human categories when we describe their behavior that way in the first place. I'm very skeptical that there are big new insights to be had when we then pull it back again and use it on ourselves, but add "just like chimps" at the end of the sentence.

And then, empirically, as I indicated in this case, most of these statements end up seeming either vacuous or false when you analyze them much, and almost never predictive. So that's also troubling.

"Second, testability is not the problem a lot of ideas start out as untestable, they should, however, give rise to predictions - like how another species will behave. "

Sure, well -- he can get back to me once he has a nontrivial prediction to make.

I mean, OK, I'm obviously overselling this a little. Sure, I believe that the historical sciences can give useful insights sometimes even without prediction, by analyzing carefully the past causes of things, etc. I'll grant that, OK. But this doesn't really seem to me like one of those cases. The explanation being offered seems strictly less explanatory than the explanation we already had.

"The amount of time it takes to get to know someone well,..."

This paragraph is largely capturing what I meant by my "time scales" remark, though you've put it more clearly. It suggests to me in particular that the number might fluctuate depending on such things as whether one had to work, the speed at which people's lives moved, etc. (For example, one might posit that people's lives and relationships tend to move faster in their 20s than in, say, their 50s. This may be true or false, I don't know. But if it's true, then it's conceivable that the number might fluctuate at that time).

"and this raises the question of what it is like to get to know a group rather than an individual (like in a corporation, you might know the 'sales department' based on stereotypes and common attitudes... thus you could imagine that level of knowing taking up 1 person's worth of your brain - though that's just a first-order approximation."

Right. But my point with the time was that the issue might not be a brain issue at all. It's conceivable that the brain would have no problem knowing 1000 people well, but that there is insufficient time in our lives, given the pace of life, to actually spend enough time on 1000 people to maintain the "know well" level of personal knowledge. If that makes sense. Of course I don't know if that's true or not.

Anecdotally -- I have known people who made it a point to memorize names, backgrounds, and basic facts about far more people than we're talking about (say 600), and to keep track of them all as well as possible.

"I think i do categorise people who i know based on traits, and sometimes i mix up which one i've told a given story too... perhaps a similar phenomena to parents calling a child by all the other names of their children before getting the right one. (I may perhaps digress, but you're offering some interesting digressions, so i will not apologise) "

Yes, I do the same, though I think it could be argued we're slipping into another category of mental task now -- the personal interaction memory, rather than the other-persion-relationship-network/history memory.

In a largely unrelated comparison to animals - have you ever heard this explaination for why humans are largely hairless:

"In a fascinating 40-year experiment starting in the 1950s, Russian foxes were bred for docility. Over the period, adult foxes become more and more like large cubs, spending more time playing, and developing drooping ears, floppy tails and patterned coats. Humans similarly have some characteristics of infantile apes – large heads, small mouths and, significantly here, finer body hair."

Ah, yes the mythical Dunbar number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number


Here's a very good satirical take on the issue of morality and
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html