The Swedish Tax Authority, a Prodigy, the Tipping Point and your friends on Facebook

  

  Number 150 is not just a number. It’s a tipping point for our brain. This tipping point hasn’t gone unnoticed by neither the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket), nor Malcolm Gladwell (author of ‘The Tipping Point’) or Edward Mullen (writer of ‘Prodigy’). This fascinating peculiarity of our brain hasn’t left unaffected not even the biggest online social network, Facebook.

  So what’s it all about?

  

It’s the year 2117. Society has come out of WWIII and the few remaining survivors have vowed to never do the same mistakes again. Reaping the effects of advanced technology, civilization has reached an unprecedented level of well-being. This is the setting of ‘Prodigy’, a book written by the Canadian-based Edward Mullen, who is not satisfied with the initial serene beginning of the story and throws his heroine, Alexandra into a world she hadn’t imagined exists.  

       

  As the story unfolds, the reader comes across number 150. In the words of one of the story’s characters, their community has figured out that they’ll be better off by adhering to this rule and dividing up and moving on when the number of their members reaches this specific amount. The result is separate communities with 150 members each, with loose ties between them and a common goal. 

  In his book ‘The Tipping Point’, Malcolm Gladwell, writes about the Hutterites, self-sufficient agricultural colonies of religious groups dispersed mainly in Northern America.

 “Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people. When things get larger than that, people become stranger to one another,” told him Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane.

 

  This is where our brain reaches its upper limit capacity: 148 (to be precise). It’s only that much of acquaintances our brain can keep track of. The Swedish Tax Agency took this seriously and in 2007, decided to reorganize placing an upper limit of 150 employees per office.     

  Number 148, or Dunbar’s Number, named after the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who proposed this under the Social Brain Hypothesis (a much debated issue among anthropologists), keeps popping up constantly. More than 21 different hunter-gatherer societies across the globe live in villages where the average number of people is 148.4.

  

In the field of combat during the centuries, fighting units were usually maintained around this number as well. You only have to bring to your mind the invincible Sacred Band of Thebes, 150 pairs of friends, an elite force of the ancient Greek city of Thebes, that was defeated only by the might of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.

 Even if we leave behind us the battlefields and the past and explore the digital era of online social networks like Facebook, we see that the same is true with the average number of Facebook-friends being about 120.

  In conclusion, you have some options there. You can go read Robert Dunbar’s book “How many friends does one person need?: Dunbar’s number and other evolutionary quirks” which is the source, or you can opt for Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” to read about it in the context of a study of trends and ideas sweeping a society only after a tipping point has been surpassed. Lastly, there’s always the choice of a nice story, like that of ‘Prodigy’ by Edward Mullen, where you’ll find out how number 150 still survives in 2117. 

Chris Dellian is the author of The Analysts, the adventure of an empirical psychologist and a computer enthusiast, that spans across the States, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Iraq and the Netherlands. In addition, Chris Dellian has authored two short stories The Halo Trap and The Summer Experiment.