Today I read a paper titled “Validation of Dunbar’s number in Twitter conversations”
The abstract is:
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