We are in contact with more people today – conducting more social interactions and processing more information, on average – than would have been thought possible, through most of human history. How does this play into our sense of being overwhelmed?
According to the social brain hypothesis, humans can, on average, maintain about 150 stable, meaningful relationships at a time. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and size of social group.
The size of the brain is a determiner “because a big chunk of our brain is required for social interactions”, says Dunbar, now 77.
“It takes a lot more neural energy to analyse what’s going on in someone else’s mind: do they like you, do you like them? We’re having to model our minds to match the state of these other people’s minds.”
What does it do to the brain, then, to have hundreds of complex interactions a day? Excerpts from an interview.
* What is it about social relationships that makes them so exhausting?
We’ve shown with brain-imaging studies that the processing of social information is much more costly for the brain than processing just ordinary physical information, like navigating a street or deciding what to eat.
It takes a lot more neural energy to analyse what’s going on in someone else’s mind: do they like you, do you like them? We’re having to model our minds to match the state of these other people’s minds.
Aside from this, you have to keep investing in friendships, or they gradually decay.
In some ways, social media can actually act as a sort of sticking plaster, slowing down the rate of relationship decay. It can take longer for somebody to go from being a good friend to “somebody I once knew”. Instead of two or three years for that transition, it can now take five to seven years for it to happen.
* In what ways will the challenges in navigating social interactions be different for Gen Alpha and Gen Beta (born between 2010 and 2039)?
I think the important issue for kids now is learning the skills that make social life possible for us, particularly in our big, modern societies – particularly the skills of diplomacy.
These are neurologically very costly for the brain too. They’re very difficult to learn. And we have to practise them a lot. Otherwise, it’s like being given the rule book for cricket and then placed on a pitch to play the game.
You have to practise and play against other teams, to learn how the rules apply.
We’re all children in a sandpit, running around. Somebody kicks the sand; it goes in your eye. Do you beat them up? What if it was an accident? What’s the best way to deal with it, even if it was deliberate?
I don’t think you can learn these skills online, because it’s too easy to just pull the plug.
The whole thing about the sandpit of life is that you cannot get out of the sandpit. You have to stay put and learn how to handle it. Therefore you gain experience in how to deal with different people. How to manage them. How to persuade them to behave better.
We never learn these rules perfectly well. But most humans have historically become competent in them.
It also takes about 25 years of life to become reasonably competent as an adult. Neuroimaging studies have come to the conclusion that social skills are so complex and so sophisticated that it really takes more than two decades to be able to function reasonably in the adult world.
My worry is that if you spend all your time online, you are not really being exposed to enough situations where you can pick up these skills and tools.
One reflection of that is when people who are largely online don’t form strong relationships and have very few close friends. And if that’s the case, my worry is that our social networks are shrinking. It could mean that societies will become even less cohesive than they already are.
If we don’t have wider experiences, we end up in a bubble. And that’s a danger in the best of times, because one of the really strong effects of strong friendship and family relationships is we end up with what is known as homophily. We just prefer people who are similar to us.
* Is that always a bad thing, to want to be around people who we get and who get us?
I grew up in East Africa, in a very small town. It was a hugely multicultural environment. My father, in fact, was born in India. My grandfather is buried there.
Their exposure to other cultures was extraordinary. My father spoke fluent Hindi and worked with traders who were Parsis, Sikhs, Goans and Gujaratis.
I grew up knowing the difference between Shias and Sunnis, Hindus and Buddhists. Everyone got along. Even as children, we knew: If you didn’t play with kids from all these other cultures, you just didn’t play.
Now the global community has grown so interconnected, it just makes it easier for people to find people who are in the same bubble. That’s part of the downside of it all.
* What do you see as the upside? What gives you hope, in the world we live in?
I’m always impressed by how good the techies are at devising suitable programs for things, once they understand what the problem is.
I’m always hopeful for the future. The question is, will we end up killing each other first? Before we get to the solution? That’s the big risk we always face.