Modern WisdomThe Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Friendship - Robin Dunbar
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
145 min read · 28,623 words- 0:00 – 0:18
Intro
- RDRobin Dunbar
The difference between men's and women's friendships is, for a woman, it matters who you are, not what you are, i.e. what you do. For blokes, the first question blokes usually ask each other is, "What do you do?" And the question is because it matters what you are, not who you are. Who you are is completely substitutable. (wind blows)
- 0:18 – 5:18
Why Humans, Monkeys & Apes Have Huge Brains
- RDRobin Dunbar
- CWChris Williamson
What is the social brain hypothesis for people that aren't familiar with it?
- RDRobin Dunbar
The social brain hypothesis is really an explanation for why monkeys and apes have much bigger brains than anybody else, uh, in the natural world, and why we, if you like, as the top end of the monkeys and apes, uh, family tree, have exceedingly big brains. And, uh, the question is, what do we use these big brains for? And the social brain hypothesis says we use it to manage our relatively large, very complicated societies, and it's that that allows us really to hold these things together, uh, as a coherent village, uh, to borrow an analogy, rather than sort of scattered individuals who never talk to each other.
- CWChris Williamson
Why wouldn't it be the case that we got bigger brains so that we could throw better or so that we could talk in more complex ways or so that we could grow cool hairstyles or do art?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Uh, most of those things, um, aren't that computationally demanding. Throwing is probably (laughs) the most complicated of those. Uh, and it's true that we do throw better than, uh, any of the other monkeys and apes, but that's really mainly because we've... our arms are freed off, uh, from, uh... because we don't walk on them, obviously, whereas monkey's and apes', um, arms have, are used for walking on. Um, but we're... our aiming isn't necessarily better than other species that chuck stuff out like spitting cobras or, uh, archer fish that, uh, uh, spit out jets of water and, and knock insects off branches. They actually probably (laughs) are more accurate than we are. No, most of these things, you know, even walking requires some, uh, computation by the brain, some calculations. But what seems to be really important for monkeys and apes is the fact that they live in these very dynamic social environments in which relationships between other people are constantly changing through time. And it's being able to manage those, not just the memory problem. It's being able to manage and predict what's going to happen in these relationships and how to integrate effectively with them within a social system 'cause the big problem you have is, if you're too rude to everybody else, they have a nasty habit of either clobbering you or just walking away and s- you know, going to live somewhere else with the over their shoulder comment that you can look after yourself if you're that clever. Um, so it, it... it's the skills of diplomacy as much as anything else. These are actually very sophisticated... And computationally, we've shown with neuroimaging experiments, brain scanning experiments, that they're much more demanding in terms of neural recruitment than, say, ordinary, um, logical thinking in terms of sort of standard causality, A causes B, as it were. Um, and I think part of the problem is because what we're having to do w- with physical things... You know, if I, if I throw my spear in this way, will I get it to end up at that target? Um, those are things in, in, in the real world. But the, the social world, what we do is build a kind of mirror, um, world in our minds, uh, peopled by avatars, which, which are based obviously on the folk out there. Um, but we're... it's... it... What we're doing is trying to, in our minds, trying to understand somebody else's mind. And, and it's... That's where it starts to get complicated because if, if I, uh, uh, um, got to, um, try and figure out what you're thinking about somebody else thinking, who in turn is thinking about somebody else elsewhere, uh, in order to, uh, you know, sort of decide which pub we're going to or something as simple as that-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
... (laughs) it starts to get notoriously difficult, you know. Get, (laughs) get five democrats in a room and you get five different views, don't you? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So, computationally, uh, having theory of mind, modeling what other people are thinking is hard.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Scaling that up beyond yourself and one person or three people or five people or 150 people becomes ever more difficult.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So the, the real simulation hypothesis or the first version of the matrix is us trying to work out whether or not we're going to... I can convince everyone to go to the pub that I like to go to tomorrow.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. That's interesting. You said... There's a really great quote from your new
- 5:18 – 13:39
How Human Social Groups Evolved
- CWChris Williamson
one, uh, The Social Brain, "Humans have only had to grapple with the stresses and complexities of living in large societies for less than 8,000 years." What is the evolutionary story of human social groups then?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Okay. So natural human groups, if you like, the, the kind of societies we've lived in for, heavens, probably the last two million years or so are the kinds of societies we still find in hunter-gatherers all over the world. So these are what are called fission-fusion or dispersed societies, where the community doesn't live all in one place. They probably own a bit of territory, if you like. Um, but the, the whole community is divided up among a number of s- much smaller camp groups-... the, the sort of standard size for these communities is about 150 people the world over, among these kinds of societies. But the size of groups they actually live in, what are sometimes called bands, uh, or the living groups is perhaps a bit more appropriate for a name for them, are typically somewhere between about 35 and 50. They're almost never bigger than 50, for one very good reason, (laughs) which I can give you. And that is everybody ends up killing each other basically. (laughs) Um, uh- Why? ... homicide rates go through the roof. It's extraordinary. Why? Why would that be the case? Uh, it's just ... Well, the reason is simply the reason, um, i- i- it that humans live in these t- dispersed societies in the first place and it's the reason why primate societies are as small as they actually are, if you put it in those terms, it's, it's simply the stresses of living in close proximity. And this is not just our problem. It's not a monkey and ape problem. It's a mammal-wide problem. Now these stresses come in two ways. The, the, uh, indirect version is that, um, given that you're trying to get everybody to the same pub for lunch when you leave the sleeping tree, (laughs) um, uh, the difficulty for any mammal is that as they're foraging on their way and, and especially back to the, to, to, to the chosen sleeping trees for, to spend the night in, what tends to happen is animals just get dispersed, as it were, over a big area and eventually they, they kind of, the groups fragment and, and animals go off on their own. This is what you see right, going on right before your eyes in, in herding species like deer and antelope and so on. Um, they, they break, the groups break up very quickly. They're coming together when they need to come together, usually as protection against predators. So if a predator hoves into view in the distance, everybody sort of clumps, tries to find the nearest, um, uh, other folk to, to, to, to gather together with. Um, birds do the same. Um, we'll see them on shorebirds very nicely. But, you know, as they forage, they kind of drift apart, and especially if their activity schedules get out of synchrony, which is a perennial problem if some animals are bigger than others. So species that have, um, dimorphic, uh, um, uh, um, uh, body sizes where, so females are much smaller than males, uh, the females have to go to rest because they fill their stomachs long before the males do. So the males typically in these, and you see it in going on in deer and antelope and the like, you know, the males will carry on feeding when the females have all gone to rest. And so the groups naturally fragment. That, that's a perennial problem for all of them. And if ... Well, your choices that, you know, sort of you can form casual groups or herds, um, and that solves your problem, but the risk you run with that is, um, that you're caught on your own, uh, the one occasion in the month when a predator turns up, at which point you are lunch. (laughs) Um, uh, because basically predators don't like attacking groups. That, that's why this grouping strategy is so common among, among birds and mammals in general. Um, so the advantage of, of the, the sort of herding strategy is it's pretty costless in terms of cognition. You don't need a big brain to do it because individual relationships are basically anonymous. All you have to know is, uh, you know, uh, am I gonna ... You know, if w- if I get into 50- fisticuffs with, with this big thug, am I gonna lose or not? I'm gonna lose, don't do it. (laughs) Stay away. Keep away from them. That's all you need to do. So the only permanent kind of relationships you have are between females and their offspring. And of course they don't last forever because once the offspring are adults they, they, they effectively become anonymous members of, of the herd and, and go their own way. So, so the alternative way is to do it the way, um, species like the primates, uh, as a, as a collective, but also some other mammals, mostly species, poor groups, the, the horse family, the elephants, the dolphins, uh, the camels, uh, especially the South American camelids, um, they form permanent stable groups, multi-generational, uh, stable groups that, that n- don't on the whole lose individuals, um, uh, particularly easily b- c- usually because it's quite difficult to go and join another group. So the only way they can become smaller is by breaking up into two, which is what they do. But to have these stable groups req- is very cognitively demanding because you need to be able to exercise the skills of diplomacy and that seems to be cognitively very expensive and that's why you need a big brain. But there is another cost now that kicks into place, which is actually what drives this tendency for mammals in general not to live socially and that is the stresses incurred from bumping up against folks. So this is, you know, the s- sort of Los Angeles freeway problem. You're just (laughs) crowded by cars. Or alternatively you might say the, the, the New York subway, uh, at rush hour problem where you're just sort of hemmed in by people (laughs) uh, who are constantly bumping up against you, not necessarily maliciously or intentionally, it's just that it is crowded space and inevitably people just kind of bump into each other and so on. And those kind of stresses, uh, have a-... terrible effect on female reproductive endocrinology. So they, they basically shut down the menstrual system. And they do it very fast, if, if the frequency rises. Uh, frequency of these kind of stresses, uh, gets, uh, up to a certain level, it will completely shut the whole system down. Um, uh, uh, this effect is so strong in basal mammals, so the generic, not terribly social gr- n- n- not permanent group living mammals, but you know, they might live in small groups, that it's actually sets an upper limit on the number of females that can live together at about five. And as far as primates are concerned, that means you can't have a group with more than about 15 individuals in it. Females are always about a third of the total group in primates. Um, so this w- would naturally, and at that point, you're only just breaking even, even as a female in terms of your reproductive output to replace yourself. So that's kind of, uh, the best w- uh, the best you can do under the circumstances if you need to live in groups. Ideally, you're much better off (laughs) living in, on your own as a, as a single female. I mean, can have as many males there apparently as, as you like, um, it... Because what creates the stress is that, seems to be whatever females are doing to each other, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't, didn't you tell me-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Because we don't quite know what's going
- 13:39 – 28:30
How Group Dynamics Impact Fertility
- RDRobin Dunbar
on.
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't you tell me that, um, concealed ovulation in humans could be explained by the fact that it stops other women intra-sexually competing with them by stressing them around the time of their ovulation, so that it could cause exactly this disruption and maybe mean that they couldn't have kids during that cycle?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Uh, this is, this is, uh, one of the possible explanations, yes, for, for concealed ovulation. Um, the other is, is it encourages male competition for you, um, because, uh, um, they don't quite know whether they've, um, uh, fertilized you or not. So, uh, if you have a free-for-all kind of mating market as you have in many s- uh, mammal species. So it encourages the males to stay around and, and, um, that then gives the females more choice, right? So it's, it's-
- CWChris Williamson
Presumably also protects the infants as well.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Not necessarily, no. Um, I mean, what, what actually... Primarily the problem that most mammals face, and eat most birds as well, is actually predation risk. Um, or, or what comes to the same thing, but probably not quite so widespread is, is, um, ecological competitors. In other words, uh, the folks in the next door valley, the next, next group as it were, uh, intruding onto your, your feeding territory. But predominantly it, it, it seems to be predation risk. And, uh, for that it is group size. So if you look at what affects female fertility in these groups, um, it increases with the size of the group, which is what we'd expect. The group is providing the protection. Um, so the bigger the group, the h- higher fertility is, is getting, because the females are being buffered against the external stresses. But at the same time, the more females there are in the group, uh, the, um, worse their fertility is going to be. So you end up with these hump shaped, uh, fertility curves, uh, when you plot fertility against group size or against, um, number of females in the group. Turns out that the number of males in the group, contrary (laughs) to what I spent 40 years trying to study ironically, (laughs) that the number of males in the group has absolutely zero effect. Um, I'm not sure if that's entirely true right away through, but in general they don't have an effect. Uh, there seems to be a tendency in, um, uh, some species for females to exploit males as hired guns basically, as, as protection. Um, uh, um, so you see this in gorillas, uh, to some extent you see it in species like gelada and possibly hemidrys baboons. But, uh, (clears throat) predominantly, the males are just kind of, eh, eh, as we believed to be the case in, in primatology since the 1960s and early '70s, is the males are just freewheeling, operating round a honey pot really. If, if females gather in a group, the males will map onto them. Um, you know, otherwise they just kind of go wandering. Um, but the, the, the (clears throat) , those effects, the mating effects that you see then really are a spin off of whatever the social structure or social organization actually is. And that depends on how many females there are in the group. But we run into this problem whereby, um, the more females there are, the more they destabilize each other's, um, menstrual s- uh, endocrinology and risk ending up infertile. You even see this in humans. So polygamous households are, are generally less fertile than, than, um, uh, um, monogamous households-
- CWChris Williamson
Does, does that-
- RDRobin Dunbar
... within a given culture.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. So (sighs) w- it seems like females have this balance that they need to strike between the, um, amount of protection and/or resources that perhaps a partner or a group could give them, with how many other females does being a part of that group expose me to?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And if you have too few resources or protection, you are at risk of predators. But if you have so many resources and protection, the other women have gravitated toward that group, you are then suffering this-... endocrinology-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... fuckery that goes on.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. Yes. So, so, a- and this is the trade-off essentially, it's the trade-off between survival in the face of particularly predation risks. So, you know, are you going to make it through, uh, to adulthood and, you know, once you get to adulthood, are you going to be able to hang around long enough to reproduce yourself, um, a- on the one hand and, uh, on the other hand, the fertility... direct fertility costs that seem to arise from these, these stresses. And I, and I hesitate to say this is not, uh, in this particular case, the females going out and beating each other up necessarily. This is just, uh, um, the fact that they are clus- if you like, they're kind of clustered together in, in, in the center of the social world, therefore they're bumping up against each other much more. This does spill over into terms of human hunter-gatherers though, because it turns out that, uh, homicide rates, so the proportion of all deaths that are due to homicide, just increases linearly with the size of the living group in, in contemporary hunter-gatherers. Um, to the point where a group of 50 is the sort of standard living group size, uh, camp group size. Something in the order of 50% of all deaths are due to homicide, and these are not warring, the consequences of fighting (laughs) with your neighbors. A lot of this is, is internal, um, fighting. Uh, most of it, of course is, is, uh, you know, consequence of, uh, badly behaved males, um, and, um, a fair share of the victims are women. Uh, um, but not exclusively so, there's an awful lot of males get clobbered in the process. And this seems to be simply a consequence of, of the rising stress levels spilling out into, uh, as the tip of the iceberg, as it were, into, um, outright violence, that, that ends up very easily in humans with, with, uh, because of our weapons, as it were. Uh, with, with w- w- w- the one party or the other, uh, being killed. At 50% of mortality due to, um, uh, homicide, this is not very good news (laughs) for the group's ability to produce (laughs) offspring to replace itself. And if you go much above that, I suspect you are very quickly into demographic negative territory. In other words, the group is shrinking rather than growing.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- RDRobin Dunbar
But I think what probably happens is it oscillates around... What seems to happen in primates is when they hit this upper limit of, uh, of fertility, uh, effect, the, what we call the infertility trap, um, what happens is the group oscillates a- around a sort of, um, average value because it, it sort of, uh, starts to... Because it's not reproducing because it's too big, it loses members through death. And then that brings the, the group size down below the threshold. Uh, so fertility kicks up again and, and, and the group starts to build up, and it just keeps doing this until eventually it'll partition into two and you get, get fishing. You see that going on in primates all the time. It seems to happen in human, uh, groups as well. Though, whether that's, uh, uh, the same cause underpinning it is, is not clear. But, but you see the same pattern in hum- small scale human groups. Um, uh, the, the, the problem for hunter-gatherers simply is that you cannot have all 150 members (laughs) of the community, the wider community living in the same place at the same time. Um, because you would end up with... By the time you get to about 90 people you, uh, 100% of all your deaths would be due to homicide. At that point you're... well, you've probably already gone extinct. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- RDRobin Dunbar
It's very, very serious.
- CWChris Williamson
How... Okay.
- RDRobin Dunbar
So what's... No, what we've... The, the surprise if you like is because we've always assumed that the reason hunter-gatherers live in these dispersed societies is for ecological reasons, "It's a tough old life out there. You got to..." You know, you can't walk down to the nearest, uh, supermarket and pick some stuff off the shelf. You've got to go around, you know, shooting animals, trapping ducks, you know, digging up some roots here and there, and it's hard work. Um, but the answer (laughs) seems to be actually maybe not.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
The problem is just the stresses and tensions, uh, have driven them apart. But they want to keep that community within bounds so that, you know, on, on the odd occasion when some serious, uh, uh, predation event occurs or, or, or, or, or, you know, or you are raided by some community from... some tribe from elsewhere, um, you can get hold of them quickly enough to band together i- i- in what's effectively a kind of herd. And of course, that extends out through the community up to the level of the tribe, just sort of usually somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people who've distributed over a much wider area. But this flexibility seems to allow them to cope both with the kind of (sighs) survival consequences of, you know, living (laughs) in the natural world, uh, on the one hand, but also managing the fertility problem. Now, the... In general the way primates handle the fertility problem is what the females do is form alliances with each other. So they form these grooming clusters, um, of two or three animals only, which just buffer them enough to defer the fertility, the negative fertility effect. That still kicks in eventually, um, uh, but it, but it, but it sort of allo- it defers it enough to allow them to live in bigger groups. So you see when you look at how primate so- societies work, the species that live in ever bigger groups-... um, seem to have broken through glass ceilings, and there seem to be about three glass ceilings they push through. At each step, they're introducing some new, uh, capacity in some way, uh, which allows them to h- hold down, uh, well, both to keep the group coordinated and stop it disappearing (laughs) in, uh, uh, over the horizon, or half the group disappearing over the horizon on the one hand, but also manages the stresses and conflicts within the group at the same time. And they seem, depending on how big the group is, they seem to kind of manage that in, in different ways. And the species that live in very big groups, um, by very big groups on, we mean on average only groups of about 50, which are what you see in chimpanzee communities and baboon, macaque type, um, so the smart social primates. Uh, what, what they exploit is these very high level cognitive skills, which are extremely expensive, um, uh, computationally, so they require a lot of neural processing. These are things like metalizing, the ability to inhibit prepotent responses, which is basically not to let the red mist rise (laughs) when somebody... (laughs) Um, so there's two issues here, as I like to put it, you know, that in the sandpit of life, this is how you work at kindergarten, you know, you're all in the sandpit playing together and, and somebody walks past you and kicks sand in your eyes. Now, the question is did they do it deliberately or was it an accident, right? It makes a big difference how you respond. If they did it as an accident, what you need to be able to do is to say, "It was an accident. I'm not gonna, you know, clobber them or kick sand back in their face, uh, uh, uh, because it, it wasn't intended." Uh, if they did it deliberately, then you have a second step which says, "Okay, you know, do I, do I behave as the, um, sandpit bully and beat them up for kicking sand in my face or do I talk to them nicely and try and talk to them round and, and use the skills of diplomacy to avoid upsetting the stability of the social environment?" So if, you know, if you exert violence in response to, uh, uh, uh, somebody else annoying you, then that tends to destabilize, um, the level of equanimity in the, in the group and the community as a whole. So it tends to cause people to want to, to leave. So if you want to keep them together, you have to exercise these skills of diplomacy. And these are very cognitively demanding because they, they require this business- this capacity to inhibit the red mist when it rises and go, "Hang on. No, no. Calm down. Calm down. Take it easy."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
Uh, they re- that requires in turn metalizing abilities because you have to be able to figure out, you know, "What were they trying to do? You know, w- were they trying to, uh, annoy me or, or was it all an accident or what?"
- CWChris Williamson
How many times have they done this before?
- RDRobin Dunbar
And al-
- CWChris Williamson
Did I see them do it to my friend yesterday?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And, and one of the thing, then what becomes very important in primate is a whole bunch of kind of high level but not quite so high level as the other two cognition skills which are generally wrapped in, as a general thing known as executive function skills. So these are causal reasoning, analogical reasoning, things like that. And one thing that primates do which nobody else can do, uh, it's unique to the, the anthropoid primates and depends principally on a bit of the brain that doesn't exist in anybody else's brain, is one trial learning. They're extremely good at inferring rules, general rules from one observation.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Because they, you know, everybody else is doing association learning, which means they've got to see it happen lots and lots of times and then they go, "Oh, yeah, that's, that's happened-"
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- 28:30 – 45:08
Why Living in a Big City is an Evolutionary Mismatch
- CWChris Williamson
effectively. Okay. So the, the, the thing that I'm finding interesting here, we've got this, you know, two million years ago up until 8,000 years ago period.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
We then have this evolutionary mismatch come and smash us in the face.
- RDRobin Dunbar
The big, the big transformation. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
How is it the case, given all of the things that you've just said, the homicide rates, the fertility, misery, all of that-
- RDRobin Dunbar
So, so, so-
- CWChris Williamson
... how, first off, how do we get into agrarian society? And then secondly, how is someone living in an eight million person city like New York?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yep. Yep. With difficulty-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
... is the answer. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Okay.
- RDRobin Dunbar
So the answer to the first one is what you see in the archaeological record. Around 8,000 years ago at the beginning of the Holocene, so after the last Ice Age, people started living in villages. Right? Up to then, they'd lived in these dispersed communities. From about 8,000 years ago, uh, they initially start living in, in villages that are community sized, so they're about sort of 100 to 200 people. So it looks like the three bands that make up a community, hunter-gatherer community, have locked together and, uh, um, uh, lived, live in one space and those very, very quickly grow, uh, in size going through town sizes of, uh, uh, maybe 1,000 people up through sort of, uh, small cities, classic, um, Neolithic cities of perhaps 5,000 people, you know, the Jerichos and the, uh, so on, uh, uh, of life. And then, of course, you know, beyond that they very quickly become, uh, king- kingdoms and, and, and, and nation states and, and where we are now. Uh, (clears throat) there's two questions here. One is, why did that happen? Uh, secondarily, why did it happen where it did? 'Cause actually it happened across a band, a latitudinal band right the way across the world at the same time.... um, and secondly, uh, how on earth did they do it? In other words, how on earth did they avoid killing each other? Just to be blunt. Um, the answer to the first question, uh, is very interesting because it turns out that ... Well, historical sociologists have thought for a long time this is a consequence of raiding primarily by, by the folks in the next door valley as it were. Um, the question is why would raiding happen at that point? The answer seems to be the population just exploded after the Ice Age, and the reason it exploded ... Or let me put, put it this way. What in retrospect we kind of realize now is it only exploded in this very narrow latitudinal band, what's known as the, um, subtropical zone, which is a very narrow 12 degrees of latitude zone that lies above the tropics, uh, immediately above the tropics, and sort of buffers the temperate zones in the northern and southern hemisphere. So, you know, in Europe and, and Asia and America, North America, you know, most of those lie in the, the temperate zone but, um, just it sort of separating the tropics proper from, from the temperate zones in this very narrow, uh, band called the subtropical zone. Now it turns out the sub- trop- subtropical zone has very interesting properties because of the way in which the growing season and pathogen densities correlate with latitude. It turns out to be in a kind of magic space where pathogen densities which decline ... Pathogen densities are very high at the equator. As, as it was famously described, uh, uh, uh, in terms of where it, where is it good to grow cocoa, West Africa. Why? Because it's hot, sweet and sloppy. That was the, uh, um, classic defin- definition of good growing conditions. That perfect conditions for, um, for pathogens. So the kind of, the closer you get to the equator, uh, the, the higher the pathogen loads you get. The pathogen loads die away, um, rather fast the further north and south you go, uh, from the, fro- from the equator. By the time you get to the top of the tropics on the northern side at least, um, pathogen densities are about as low as they are further north in, in, in Europe and Asia. Um, but growing season is still quite long, so you haven't got into the temperate zone where, where you start to have proper winters. So you've got lots of ... Growing conditions are perfect, and at that time after the last, uh, retreat of the last Ice Age, the, that temperate zone across the old world, um, um, uh, in particular, was absolutely rich. I mean, the Sahara was lush and green with big rivers and lakes in the middle of it and hippopotamuses and crocodiles having fun together, and fishes and baboons and all sorts of stuff, which now, uh, don't live anything closer than about 1,000 miles to further s- further to the south. Because what ha- ... So you have at this particular point in time, you have this sudden burst of richness, populations just explode, and suddenly you've got a lot of people, uh, competing for sp- space and resources. And when that happens, the easiest way to get hold of, uh, any kind of resources is, is basically to steal it off your neighbors. S- so the response was to try and live in, in groups. Now that they had then to solve the, the stress problem, um, but what's interesting is, is, uh, just before I talk about that particular ... What happened around 4,500 or 4,200 years ago, uh, there was a massive climate change event and, um, the, uh, Sahara dried up as, as, as did so you've got all this sort of Rajasthan deserts in India and, and so on and so forth right away around the, round the globe basically in these, uh, subtropical zones. And things got very nasty as a result of that because there was a lot of political turmoil that happened. Um, (clears throat) but, but the ... And that encouraged them to kind of live in even bigger, bigger cities, I guess. But the, the big problem I think at this point ... And we've always seen again the Neolithic is, "Oh, at the time we invented agriculture and obviously that's why we lived in villages, so that we could all sort of work on the land together." And the answer is, well, actually nobody ever does that, you know? Show me (laughs) a culture anywhere around the world where everybody in the village cooperates to dig a patch. They all have their own patches. Right? Um, you know, it's not until you get into commercial scale, uh, farming to feed empires, you know, Rome, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and burgeoning populations in Europe in the, in the Medieval times, that you start to get commercial side plantations where, uh, you have lots of people working together or employed to work together, um, uh, o- on farms. Prior to that, and everywhere else in the world even now, you know, sort of, um, peasant farming is, is done by the family. That's it. You don't necessarily need a big family even. Uh, and what's more, um, it's become clear from the archeology that, uh, growing cereals was actually invented before people started living in, in, um, uh, villages. It, it predates, uh, the set- first settlements by about 1,000 years. Obviously it's not very easy to, to, to have big farms if you have a nomadic way of life. But still, you know, it's possible to have some kind of temporary farming sort of eff- horticultural kind of effects, and that's seems to be what they're doing. Now, the big problem they had was literally ...... to how to avoid killing each other. And I think what they did was introduce a whole ... In fact, we can show this with living, uh, the transition between living hunter-gatherers and living horticulturalists living in slightly bigger groups of 100 to 200 people. Um, they introduced social institutions which allowed them to manage, as a community, manage the stresses, and particularly to manage, um, uh, the, the kind of violence that tends to erupt among, among young males. So what, the kinds of things you can see, and these are brought in sequentially as they hit glass ceilings in, in terms of community size, things like men's clubs where they can kind of sit down. The, the, the classic one which I always cite because I think it's just such a lovely example is what the American Plains Indians done, so people like the Blackfoot and so on. Uh, e- um, normally they lived, uh, dispersed hunter-gatherers life in, in small groups of 50 to 70. Then once a year, they gathered together for the buffalo hunt, right? You got a thousand people crammed together with all their teepees, all those classic photographs of the 19th century. Uh, what they did, uh, was have a whole lot of institutions which allowed them to manage, uh, um, stresses and particularly any outbreak of violence wi- within the community, one of which was to introduce a police force that they would take all the young men from one, or all the men of fighting age if you like, from one hunter-gatherer band and say, "Okay, this year you're the police force. Uh, y- you know, you're, you're responsible for going around and, and knocking a few heads together when necessary." But what they ... The other thing they did when, uh, there was a bit of a brawl broke out perhaps between, between two idiots is they would take them, they'd have a special teepee, the peace teepee. They would sit them down in the peace teepee, make them smoke a peace pipe together, and all the other men are sitting round the outside edge of the teepee and make them talk to each other (laughs) and sort out their problems in front of everybody else, and then everybody comes out of it. I mean, aside from the fact that-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. That's like a, that's like a, a neolithic version of Jerry Springer or, or counseling or, uh-
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs) . Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... an intervention of some kind. You have the talking rock-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Hold the talking rock-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes. Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Now it's my turn to have the talking rock.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so those kind of things, so those men's clubs, s- you see them all over the place in these kinds of societies, sort of post, post-hunter-gatherer societies. You don't see them in hunter-gatherer societies. Uh, uh, at s- at least we've, I've never found an example of one. So they're rare at best.
- CWChris Williamson
So just, just to interject there, Robin. So what, what you're suggesting is that as the, um, group sizes began to scale up, the only way that you could restrict this over 90 people, 100% of homicides, 100% of deaths-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... being due to homicide is through s- rudimentary social institutions, uh-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes. Oh, yes, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... kind of legislation, early legislation.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. It g- it gives-
- CWChris Williamson
Cultural technology is probably more shame and guilt and, and accusation-
- RDRobin Dunbar
It's ... Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... stuff like that.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. It's, it's pre-legislation. There's not a lot of kind of formal legislation. In other words, there's no judicial system. They tend to appear later, right? They, they do come in, but they come in at much bigger group sizes. Uh, what you get in this kind of black hole period space somewhere between f- living group sizes of 50 and living group sizes of about 400 is this series of things. So in, in addition to things like men's club, you get charismatic leaders. So these are, you know, people who have authority and power by virtue of their acknowledged skills, maybe as a hunter, maybe possibly as a warrior, maybe-
- 45:08 – 52:58
How Did We Get From Small Tribes to Larger Settlements?
- CWChris Williamson
okay, I, I mean this is fascinating, the fact that we have this, um, kind of a little bit like an arms race between the externalities that come from group size-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... and the technologies that then need to be developed. It's almost like the predator-prey ecology thing that you would see-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... throughout evolution. Um, I'm still struggling to understand why these bigger groups came together at all. If what you're saying is that individual families were the ones that were farming, I, at, at this stage I don't know why they have decided-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Just-
- CWChris Williamson
... to pull together into 400 and 1,000-person groups.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. Th- this, this is almost always to do with protection from raiding, it seems. Uh, the, the farming bit is simply the way of provisioning. You know, if you, if you've got 500 people, 1,000 people living together, you very quickly exhaust the natural resources of the kind used by hunter-gatherers in your immediate area. So if, if, if you're going to, uh, feed yourself in the way we've always done as hunter-gatherers, it means you're just being pushed to go further and further and further out.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Uh, you know, and at some point it just becomes impossible and the whole system will collapse in starvation, in effect. Um, (clears throat) farming solved that for us, so it allowed us to live in villages because we could kind of do all that food production close by. But the real driver for it ...
- CWChris Williamson
Without having to continually cycle along, yeah. Yep.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, in the end, of course, you know, you exhaust the land if you overuse it. Uh, but that takes much longer-
- CWChris Williamson
Smart cultivation and cycling of crops and so on and so forth.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All those clever things can come in that, that mitigate that a bit. But there's nothing you can do ... You know, if you go killing antelope and, and, uh, you know, sort of eat and cutting down fruit trees (laughs) for, for, for firewood and all that sort of thing that we, we insist on doing, um, uh, in, in a way a hunter-gatherer might, you very quickly empty the land around you, and that, that, the sort of circle expands further and further out, whereas obviously, you know, you can grow food, um, uh, like cereals and the like on relatively small pieces of land and you can keep doing it year after year on the same bit of land. Eventually you might have to lift the entire village and move somewhere else, but that's a thousand years down the road. You know, we can let somebody else worry about that. The next generation can deal with it. The, you know, farming works fine, you know, uh, for, for a generation with ... It rarely causes many problems in that sense when you start a new, uh, clear new land and, and start farming. Um, so, so the ag- the agriculture bit, which isn't very complicated at the end of the day ... And as I say, it, it, the archeologists now agree, I think, that, um, you know, people started doing simple agriculture well before they started living in villages. But, you know, it, it's an easy solution to the food problem. The real, I think the real big problem, uh, they struggled with was how to keep the lid on the stresses, uh, of having people in compact areas. And it, and it l- really looks like you had this explosion in population. And this is why it only happened in this zone. It didn't happen anywhere else, because the population sizes or at least the conditions for population growth weren't anything like as bounteous as they were in, in the northern subtropical zone. It didn't happen in the sub- southern, uh, subtropical zone-... um, partly because there isn't so much land down there and also partly because the land is much more, uh, desert-like right the way around the world. So you can see rain shadow of the Andes, uh, o- on the Argentinean Plains there and so on, and the South African High Veld. These areas have always probably been like that. Uh, uh, and it's sort of grassland basically, and not very productive. So, so you, you never seem to have had this transition from hunter-gathering into, to agriculture and settlements down there that you had in the north. And, and it is still the case that, that all the, uh, folk who lived down there historically, and, and to this still some extent survive down there, predominantly are, at least until very recent, uh, historical, um, times, uh, were all hunter-gatherers. You know, there were, there were no serious settlements until, till, let's say, 500 years ago, something like that, when e- essentially agriculture was brought down, uh, from, from, from the northern hemisphere. So, um, (clears throat) uh, you have these rather peculiar and special conditions in, in the north, north, northern subtropical zone which sort of kicked off this population explosion, triggered this sort of retreat into, um, uh, defensible positions. That's why a lot of these places are built on, uh, you know, sort of natural, uh, hilltops and, and the like. Think of the Iron Age forts in, in, in, in, uh, Europe, Northern Europe. Uh, but you see this response all the time historically, and this is a well-documented response. We look at the, uh, American Indian populations in the Southwest and their response both to each other, as you had the kind of, um, uh, uh, Na-Dene-speaking peoples coming down, intruding down into, into the area of these, these original tribes. Um, uh, but also the Spanish later coming up, uh, from Mexico. Uh, their response was always, when things get tough, they retreated from their nice, rich riverside, um, uh, villages and went off onto the top of mesas, uh, which were much, much, um, uh, uh, more defendable. And you see exactly the same thing happening West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries in response to slaving by Arab and African slaving expeditions which were fueling the transatlantic trade. The, the, the target populations would retreat from their nice flat (laughs) v- valley bottoms, um, up into the hills because it just made it much more difficult for, for, for raiding parties, particularly horse-borne raiding parties, uh, to move around up there. Much more defensible. You see it, um, uh, in, uh, the 19th century, early 19th century in, in, uh, Zambia, um, where a lot of the, the, uh, Chewa, for example, who spread out into Malawi, in response to slave-raiding by the Zuni, um, uh, uh, um, uh, Impis coming up from, from, from, uh, further south in, in, in, in South Africa in the, around Natal and places. Uh, (clears throat) uh, the Zulu, uh, um, uh, raiding passes after the big Zulu Civil War in the, in the 1830s. They were forced to retreat or they opted to retreat again up in, in, into the mountains from their nice valley bottoms. And it was only once slavery, uh, and these, um, slaving expeditions, uh, in these particular cases were, uh, stopped, uh, as a result of, um, European, uh, colonization of these interior places, that people went back down again, you know? Once, once the threat had been removed, they kind of went, "Yippee, (laughs) it's a bit grim up here (laughs) in, in the clouds." And back down they go. So there, this is a kind of natural response by, by humans really, to clump together and find defendable positions to live in.
- 52:58 – 1:02:01
The Evolutionary Struggles of Growing Groups
- CWChris Williamson
Why... Two questions. First one, how did women mitigate the messing up of their fertility cycle, given that they're now, we're now talking about 400,000-person groups living together? Is it simply that when you have a house and there's a little bit of land in between you and the people around you, that you manage to buffer that impact? And then secondly, is it simply a case of continuing to scale what you've suggested there, which is you increase the group size, you increase some cultural technologies and some social institutions to deal with it? I- i- is it a straight line from 400 people in the Neolithic period to Manhattan in 2023?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Uh, basically I think so. Uh, uh, uh, my view has come round to be all this stuff, uh, uh, can be explained basically as a consequence of demography and the stresses that demography, the costs and the benefits introduced by, by, by demography essentially. Um, t- the, the issue of female fertility in these contexts are very interesting, uh, as to how they've managed it. I think a lot of it has been, uh, the imposition of external, um, uh, control, if you like, a- at a societal level. So, you know, there, there are laws, um, um, sort of, uh, uh, you know, sort of the Ten Commandments (laughs) saying you can't do this and you can't do that in, in different forms, combined with, um, the imposition of some sort of judicial system so that, th- you know, sort of miscreants can be duly punished and, and, uh, this, this helps to, you know, it, it, you know... People do occasionally learn if they're punished (laughs) to behave better. Um, but also there's a sense in which it, you know, it's an example-... but polres ultra for the others, you know. "Don't do this kind of thing because you'll just get into trouble." So all those kind of things help in their little, in their little bit. Um, I, I think that... A- and you know, that clearly had, makes it possible f- for people to live in big groups because... And it's clear that, you know, w- when political control, judicial control, whatever you want to call it, is lost, as in times of civil war. The whole thing just falls apart and collapses very, very quickly. Uh, mayhem and, and, and you know just... You have to look at Ukraine. Uh, um, you know, people just behave incredibly badly whenev- basically whenever they have the, a free hand.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Um, uh, so, but, but that's the sort of big scale. I think there was still a lot of things going on and beneath the surface, which played a very strong role at the women's level, in particular. Uh, one of them, and this is I'm sure very, very ancient, is this tendency for women to have a best friend forever, a BFF. This is a kind of foreign territory for blokes, right? You don't really find them in blokes. I mean if you ask a bloke, "Do you have a best friend?" He'll go, "Yeah, Jimmy. You know, I have a pint of beer with Jimmy every, every, every Friday night or something, down at the pub. We meet up, and I've known him since we were at primary school." Uh, they tend to be actually very long-lasting, those kind of friends in, men's friends. Much longer-lasting than women's best friends forever, paradoxically. But they're very, very few and far between, and they're very substitutable because if Jimmy decides to go off to Thailand for the rest of his life, you know, Chris just shrugs his shoulder and goes, "Oh, it's great. We, we had a great time, but you know, Pete will do." (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
And you just substitute Jimmy with Pete-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- RDRobin Dunbar
... and everything is exactly as it was before. That doesn't happen with women's best friends however. They're very... And this is a reflection about the women's... If you look at all the literature on friendship and all the work we've done on friendship, women have these very focused, personalized friendships, culminating in the best friend forever phrāṇoṛcē. Very, very tight. What we used to call platonic friendships, because they're, they're rather like romantic relationships in their intensity, but they don't have the sexual element to them. Right. Um, (clears throat) uh, those, those kind of friendships however, they are brittle, um, like romantic relationships. They're, they're, they're built on trust and you can tolerate a lot of, um, small, um, breakdowns of trust. You forgive them, forgive them, forgive them. But eventually, you've had enough and everything terminates catastrophically-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, does-
- RDRobin Dunbar
... and you never speak to each other again.
- CWChris Williamson
... the amount of intensity cause a degree of pressure that's sometimes difficult to keep up with?
- RDRobin Dunbar
That's possible, but I think these relationships are, are hugely supporting as it were in providing a kind of... Both in keeping the pressure- Because the way these, these grooming coalitions work in monkeys and apes, you know, is they're not kind of, um, attacking uh, um, alliances in which, uh, you know, um, does happen from time to time. But by and large, you know, it's, it's not built around your friends sort of leaping in with their swords and, and, uh, and, and shield flying everywhere, uh, because you've got attacked by somebody else. The way it works is passive defensive, just keeps everybody off your back, and reduces the pressure from you, even within a large social group. Right. So that, that seems to be in effect what, what be- these best friends forever are doing, and they... Of course they're providing lots of things like emotional support and support during, uh, uh, uh, childbirth, uh, and, and in particular, um, the, the long, uh, rearing period that, that humans have, you know, bring that-
- CWChris Williamson
Also, I would, I would guess protection from gossip, uh, retributive gossip against-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... gossipers that are-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Sure. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... pointing stuff in your direction.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. Yes, that's right. It d- I mean, these are all things which just allow you to dampen down these kind of things. So it's not about excluding, you know, solving the problem completely. It's just about getting the pressure down low enough that it doesn't rub off too heavily on you and trigger any of these kind of, uh, infertility effects. Um, you know, whereas, uh, what I always describe the difference between men's and women's friendships is, is for, for a woman it matters who you are, not what you are, i.e. what you do, right? For blokes, the first question blokes usually ask each other is, "What do you do?" (laughs) And the question is because it matters what you are, not who you are. Who you are is completely substitutable. What you're looking at is a club. Um, and you see this on, on Facebook. If, if there's, if there's two people in the photograph, the profile photograph, that's the pro- profile photograph, what you'll see is, uh, for e- if it's a girl's page, it's either... Uh, if it isn't me and my mom or me and my baby, if, if they're the same age, it's my romantic partner or it's my best friend forever. Right? And typically, they won't have m- many... It's very rare for them to have more than two people in, in the, in the photograph if they have any at all, other than themselves. If there's three, four, or five people in the photograph, it is always the blokes' page. And they're always activity-based. You know, it's five blokes sitting in the five-a-side football goal mouth-... sorry, soccer goalmouth (laughs) from, from the amateur Saturday evening, Friday evening, uh, games, games we play. Uh, or it's five of us sitting on top of the mountain at Machu Picchu, you know, or it's five of us in our canoes on, o- on, uh, uh, uh, o- on the, on, on Lake Superior, or, or whatever it is you do. It's always activity-based so the, the definition of a club is very casual, right? It can be as casual as, uh, "Can you get a glass of beer from the table to your mouth without spilling it?" If you can, that's, uh, makes you a member of the club, and therefore anybody that can do that can substitute. The club is small. It's four or five guys. You can't have more than that, it doesn't work. But, as I say, you know, if Jimmy decides to go off (laughs) traveling to Thailand, uh, it's too bad, there's a spare slot, J- you know, Pete is just shoehorned into it, and he goes into exactly the same position occupied by Jimmy and everybody (laughs) treats him as though he was Jimmy. So it's weird stuff. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) I'm Pete, you're Jimmy now. Um, what, what's,
- 1:02:01 – 1:17:41
Differences Between Male & Female Friendships
- CWChris Williamson
what are the other interesting differences between male and female friendships, how they relate, how they bond, why they make up and break up, and-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... what can predict their friendships?
- RDRobin Dunbar
So, so the key difference really then i- is spun off this, uh, or, or perhaps it's m- made ... Better way of putting it is it, uh, it actually underpins it, and that is in the way that, uh, um, the dynamics of the relationship, the way it's built up and maintained. With women that is always conversation-based because they're always focused on engaging in a kind of discussions of, of emotional content and relationships in the social world on a one-to-one kind of basis. Uh, and what keeps women's friendships going is the frequency with which they can do that. So if they move apart, whether the friendship survives or not into the future depends on how much effort they put into trying to have conversations with them. It might be on the phone, it might be on Zoom, uh, or, or, you know, if, if they can't manage face-to-face with them. The amount of time devoted to conversation has zero effect on men's friendships, and I mean zero. Doesn't affect whether it dies or, uh, uh, uh, increases. Um, and that's because their friendships, their social world is built around activities, doing stuff together, right? So my kind of iconic example of boys bonding is there was ... Used to be a lovely picture of, of two old Greek men sitting in the sunshine outside a taverna, uh, either side of a table and, and, and, and every so often they would pick up their, uh, ouzo, uh, and, uh, or their coffee and, or, or whatever, and, and take a sip and put it down, but they never said anything. This is boys bonding. Uh, conversation is absolutely
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
... unnecessary. I mean, you have to kind of talk to people to get things going, but actually, you know, once it's going it, it ... What's really important is, is doing stuff together and, and conversation then becomes much, much less important. Um, so that dynamic then kind of bears into the size of that inner core of, of friends as it were. I mean, you know, so whether you have a, uh, this best friend phenomenon or not, or whether you just have this, this five layer of kind of, (clears throat) uh, best friends, and women will have a five layer. It's just that it's, it's a, a kind of hub and spoke kind of, uh, um, structure in which the relationships are between, uh, pairs of individuals where- whereas the boys, uh, five, will be m- kind of much more, um, uh, uh, n- I wouldn't, uh, hesitate to say the word interconnected, but i- it's kind of much lower level and more diffuse in its structure so that it's much, uh, uh, better interconnected in a network sense. And I think that's why, um, their friendships are probably less prone to, uh, catastrophic failure than women's seem to be. Um, women's friendships, as I said, have this fragile sort of f- characteristic to them that they can suddenly just collapse and break because somebody has done something, whereas what tends to happen with boys' relationships is they just drift apart because they just stop bothering to see each other.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RDRobin Dunbar
So, okay, you know, they might take a swing at each other if one gets really annoyed. Um, but usually what happens if, um, they take a swing at each other is they just, just go and have a beer afterwards and they can ... Nobody says anything. Nobody ever-
- CWChris Williamson
I was gonna say that having a swing at each other doesn't predicate the friendship continue.
- RDRobin Dunbar
No.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It could actually be the beginning of a great friendship.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
So I, I understand, I-
- RDRobin Dunbar
And what, what's interesting in this context is boys will never talk about why they had a fight. You know, once it's dealt with, right, and they've had a drink together, it's kind of never mentioned un- unless it's mentioned as a, as a laugh, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- RDRobin Dunbar
"Do you remember that time?" You know?
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Whereas, whereas girls will be much more concerned-
- CWChris Williamson
Whereas for women the, the bitterness and resentment may linger.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah. It's gone. Yeah. They're, they're much more concerned to go and, "I want to talk it through with you," you know, "Why'd you do this?" And so my ... This is my observation, I'm kind of putting two and two together, but I'm very conscious of the fact in this kind of restorative justice sense where they, you know, the police will offer you this opportunity to go and talk to the prisoner, uh, who, you know, robbed you blind and broke into your house and robbed you blind or beat you up in the street and, and stole your purse off you. It's ... I, I'd be interested to know what the, the, uh, p- uh, actual percentages are, but my sense is it's always women that want to do that.... and then just shrug their shoulders-
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, the guys would want to be-
- RDRobin Dunbar
... and go, "What for?"
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, either not talk to them or throw, throw them in an octagon together and, with-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Just (laughs) ta, yes, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... for five minutes each day. So I can understand-
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I can understand why it would be that women would have this, um, predisposition toward the hub and spoke model, especially with alloparenting-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... especially with, uh, increased physical risk, uh, high tolerance for pain, all of these, uh, lower tolerance for pain or lower, uh, higher sensitivity to pain. What is the adaptive reason for why men can have these slightly lower level, a little bit more diffuse, slightly more interconnected, cloud-style relationships and friendships, as opposed to the hub and spoke model?
- 1:17:41 – 1:22:47
Why Men Think Women Are Attracted to Them
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. How would you square that circle with the male over-perception bias of attraction?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Meaning?
- CWChris Williamson
That men on average seem to presume that the woman that they're speaking to, even if it is in-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... incredibly platonic-
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... is more into him than she actually is.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Yes. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Why would the man have not cottoned on earlier than five to seven years?
- RDRobin Dunbar
Uh, um, um, well, I, I think, well, there's, there are several reasons. That's an interesting question. Um, but I don't know that anybody... So what we have here, if you like, is two different bits of observation which don't look as though they'd add up, but nobody's actually ever bothered to put them together so far, partly because I don't think they've kind of... You know, people tend to look at one problem at a time. They look at one side of the, the, the, one side of the coin without looking at the other at the same time. So, you know, it would be nice if s- people who do courtship studies of this kind and mate choice preferences actually tried looking at both together. It might give us a... My guess is that men are just much more casual about these things, right? There's... You know, I suppose you might argue, well, it's because they're not pair-bonded, but my sense is that if you look at any relationship, if you just look at pictures of happily married couples or pictures of, uh, couples in romantic relationships and just look at the eyes, the girl is always looking at the bloke, and the bloke is looking into the distance somewhere over here.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RDRobin Dunbar
It's just so real. You couldn't make it up. Right? So I think what happens is girls have this predisposition to lock onto-... once they made their mind up, right, everybody wants to marry Mr. Darcy. They've got a picture of who the perfect, uh, um, uh, partner is going to be, and then they just go for it. And, and, you know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But some- the point is, at the end of the day, somebody has to get the thing off the ground, right? Otherwise, nothing will happen, you know. They'll just sit on opposite sides of the dance floor and, uh, and, and ignore each other. Uh, so somebody has to get up and make, make a move from it, and, and it seems like the girls do it. And, and my sense is that's because they're... one of the outcomes that they're looking for is being able to have what's effectively a hired gun, just like Marco Wilson, uh, um, suggested. Um, (clears throat) uh, uh, uh, be- and that's because they're making much more complex decisions than boys. You look at any of the literature on mate choice strategies, which w- we did a lot of work on using personal ads long time ago, m- men make very simple decisions. It's basically, uh, indices of fertility. So attractiveness and age and, and really, they're just not interested in anything beyond that. Uh, women are much more demanding in what they specify they're interested in. And as a result, they also say very little about themselves, other than their age and that, that they're attractive (laughs) 'cause they know that that's the only thing that will Get to optimize for your market.
- CWChris Williamson
... pick the ones for the book.
- RDRobin Dunbar
You got to know the market. Yes, uh, absolutely. Uh, it is, it is unbelievably accurate that the two sexes' understanding of what the (laughs) other sex is looking for in the mating market, and they, you know, adjust their behaviors, but, uh, in what terms of what they have to offer. But what they look f- what they offer about themselves, uh, uh, uh, uh, sorry, what they look, look for, um, women tend to be much, much more demanding than males. And I think it's because they're trying to balance many more different things in the system because obviously, kind of from a biological point of view, uh, uh, uh, uh, this whole business is about reproduction ultimately. So, you know, reproduction isn't just producing babies. It's all that follows beyond that in terms of being able to rear them to adulthood and so on. So I think, you know, the, the... it doesn't surprise me, put it this way, that it's... that women should make an early and very clear decision. Uh, th- they're having to make a kind of best of a bad job, uh, choice because nobody, uh, satisfies all the boxes. Uh, so you kind of do the best you can, you know, and, and, you know, it's a, it's a frequency-dependent thing. There is only one Mr. Darcy in the village, right? And only one person is going to get them. So, you know, if Jemima gets him, you have to settle for the curate. Fine. But at least (laughs) you... that's your number two choice. So you, you know, ticks enough boxes, uh, uh, uh, to satisfy your, your, your requirements. So you've got these very complex decisions going, which... but it, it means they kind of seem to make a much more focused and, and decisive and early decision on whether to go, uh, or, or who to choose. And, and the blokes kind of just fall in line, um, I'm sorry to say.
- CWChris Williamson
What are you working on next? So for me to try and
- 1:22:47 – 1:25:38
Where to Find Robin
- CWChris Williamson
track the... not only the frequency of books that you put out, which is terrifying, uh, but also, it, it seems... I can't think of a better word. It seems meandering in a nice way. We've got, we've g- we've had religion, we've had friendships, we've had, uh, the social brain, which kind of applies friendships and, and group health to the business world. Uh, we've had stuff to do with sex and attraction. What's next? What, what can people expect from you next?
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs) Well, actually, I'm still trying to sort, sort out what's going on in primate social (laughs) systems and their evolution. But I think we now have a coherent full story. So the next book is to try and put that all together in one place because a lot of this literature is very scattered in, in journals all over the place. And I think one of the problems is people, uh, don't see the big picture. So it's sort of become incumbent on me, I think, to try and bring this all together, present the whole story, and show the evidence for it. And then the follow-up book is, uh, applying that to humans really. So it's really doing the friends book with the data. Uh, not the whole of the friends book, but the essence of how we create communities out of, uh, essentially s- friendships, how, how friendships scale up to create communities and why we create communities. Basically what we've been talking about. Uh, but this time providing the actual evidence in this. That's the next book. Then once I've done that, I, I think I'm exhausted, uh, of, of doing this kind of stuff, and I'm going to do, uh, a history book, which then applies all this stuff to historical, uh, uh, um, phenomena. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
You're a monster. You're an absolute beast. I... th- there's a-
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs) I just have fun, I just have fun.
- CWChris Williamson
... n- there's a... no, br- you don't understand, Robert.
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
There is a group of my friends who are, uh, uh, at Cambridge, who are over here at UT, and every time that you release a new book or that someone spots that a new book comes out, it gets posted in one of our group chats saying, "Fucking Dunbar's written another book again," and I, I-
- RDRobin Dunbar
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... still haven't finished the proposal for mine. So I... look, I, I absolutely adore all of the work that you do. I really, really appreciate your time today. Uh, I can't wait to see what you do next, and I'm very much looking forwards to, uh, having the next discussion about whatever it is.
- RDRobin Dunbar
Well, uh, it's a great pleasure always to chat to you because it's such fun, and, um, thank you for having me yet again. Oh, it's Until next time. Thank you, mate. (laughs) Very good. All the best.
- CWChris Williamson
(instrumental music plays) What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.
Episode duration: 1:25:38
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