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Small groups of up to twelve persons

A cognitive limitation of man concerns the size of the group in which he can, without the help of tools, understand what is occuring. The human being is first of all an animal which can enter into alliances, i.e. "an union between people resulting from an agreement or a pact 1". If many animals can live in herds or packs, very few can choose by themselves to enter into an alliance. Great apes and some cetaceans manage to enter into alliance with up to three individuals, but we humans are limited to twelve2.

For more information: the limit of twelve for human groups

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar became interested in the relationship between the size of the neocortex of 38 species of monkeys and the size of the respective groups in which they
lived 3. Surprisingly, he has found a correlation between these two elements. He then extrapolated this approach in humans to conclude that the natural limit to the size of a human social network was 148, a number that usually rounded to 150, is called the "Dunbar number" . This number corresponds to the size of the breeders-farmers' villages of the Neolithic, and is still found today in the size of social networks.4. this number – considered by Dunbar as rather approximate – determines the number of persons whith whom we can easily socialize without tools (these tools can be for example the list of friends on Facebook, or simply our adress book, which eanbles us to get in touch with much more people than we can even remember...)5.

The confidence which allows to create alliances requires however to have not only an overview of the various members of the group but also the links between them. We talk of holoptic approach6 (from the Greek holos, whole and optikós, related to sight) in opposition to the panoptic approach7 ( from the Greek pan, all) which enable to see all the persons but not necessarily the links between them.

So, even if chimpanzee have a number of Dunbar around 55 which allows them to maintain packs of this size, they can only enter into alliance with three. Mankind, besides having a high number of Dunbar also has a capacity of holoptism which allows her to create alliances with a dozen people. The maximal size of this alliance corresponds to 144 links between people (by taking into account simultaneously the people themselves and the differences in the link between a first person and the second, and the mutual link of the second towards the first one). So, besides his capacity to constitute a social network of about 150 people (what corresponds to the size of the breeders-farmers' first villages of the Neolithic), mankind is also capable of entering into an alliance which allows her complexer collective actions up toapproximately a dozen people8.


We don't know thus how to cooperate normally in groups of more than a dozen people. To go beyond, we had to develop strategies: set up a hierarchy so that the leader manages at the most a dozen second-in-commands who themselves shall manage a dozen people 9 ; or else have representatives (of God or of the Peolpe) which allow us to focus on a few persons according to a centralized star-shaped structure ; or even trust a single mechanism of exchange in the group - money - rather than having to know every person and every interaction between them. But could we exceed the barrier of twelve to benefit directly from the collective intelligence of a largest number without having a hierarchy, representatives or monetary mechanisms as intermediaries?