Cognitive Design

Ever wonder how people with 1000+ friends on Facebook, MySpace or some other social networking site manage it? Said another way (and I get this question frequently) from a cognitive standpoint, how many friends can we interact with meaningfully on a social networking site?

One answer, according to a recent post on Physorg Blog is approximately 150. The post draws on work that was done in the early 90s by Robin Dunbar:

 ”Dunbar reached the value of Dunbar’s number by studying a wide range of societies throughout history, including social circles from Neolithic and Roman times, to the modern office, and in non-human primates. The value of 150 is an approximation and there is no precise value, but Dunbar found that social groups larger than around this number tended to splinter.”

Research reported by FaceBook tends to support this number. Dunbar argues that this limit is imposed by the structure/function of our Neocortex.

One implication of this is that the current generation of social networking technology does little or nothing to amplify my capacity for managing relationships meaningfully. This presents a challenge to the cognitive designer:

How can the next generation of social networking software be designed from a cognitive standpoint to increase my social intelligence so that I can meaningfully manage 300 relationships?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Augmented Cognition, Related Fields. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.