Power in numbers
Humans gather in particular and consistent group sizes. That matters to arts management.
“too many people
so little choices
everything is overwhelming
too many bodies in one place”
—Wyatt Waddell, from “Should’ve Stayed Home”
We humans evolved and thrived in large part because of our social nature. As developmental psychologist Linnda Caporael (2014) names the evidence:
One look at the human body—a long period of immaturity, no claws, pitiful canines, no hidden sacs of toxic sprays, and not even four feet—and it is clear that such specifics of bodily form co-evolved with group living.
Our capacity for thinking, acting, and learning in groups is a defining quality of our species. But that doesn’t mean that bigger groups are always better.
Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar (1998, 2024) famously suggested 150 as the upper limit to a productive human social network (now known as “Dunbar’s Number”). Group activity, he argued, requires significant information-processing power (noticing and remembering trustworthiness, tracking relative power and status, communicating in context, learning and adapting to social cues, and so on). The size and speed of the human neocortex suggested 150 as an approximate ceiling to an active social group (1998). Through subsequent research, this number “has been confirmed by 23 studies of personal social networks and ethnographic communities…from a wide range of cultures and historical periods over the last 2000 years” (2024).1
Dunbar also noticed that human groups tended to cluster tightly around specific quantities (5, 12, 35, 150, 500, and 2,000), which “seem to represent points of stability or clustering in the degrees of familiarity within the broad range of human relationships, from the most intimate to the most tenuous” (1998).
Linnda Caporael (2014) focused on a smaller set in that array, and suggested that each human grouping served a unique and essential function:2
Dyad (2) - “affords possibilities for microcoordination such as facial imitation in a mother-infant dyad and the automatic coupling of gait that occurs when two people walk together.”
Task Group (5) – affords distributed cognition, sense-making, and action required for foraging, hunting, gathering, and other direct engagements with habitat.
Deme or Band (30) – supports movement from place to place, general processing and maintenance, and task group coordination.
Macrodeme or Macroband (300) – affords “exchange of individuals, resources, and information” across demes, as well as “development, stabilization, and standardization of language,” often in seasonal gatherings.
These group clusters are remarkably consistent across geographies and evolutionary time.
“So what?” I hear you say. “I’m an arts manager, help me be a better one.” Fair enough.
These evolutionary, genetic, and adaptive tendencies shape what’s possible in your own collective work. You can want to have a task group of 11 people, but know that almost every fiber of your being (and your team’s beings) finds that to be an awkward and exhausting challenge. You can ask a governing board of 30 people to think and act as a task group, but they will be better suited for “general processing and maintenance,” and for coordination of subgroups (aka, committees or project teams of about five people). You can build an audience of 1,000 true fans, but know that their relationship with you will be vastly different than your relationship with them (and sometimes, that difference will get weird).
In brief, imagine yourself as a captain or first mate of a ship with a determined destination. You can either ignore the tidal forces between here and there, or you can notice and navigate them as part of the journey. Human social capacity is one of those tidal forces. Go with the flow.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).
Framework of the Week: Affordances
Affordances refer to the actionable possibilities that an environment offers to an organism, based on the organism’s capabilities. Essentially, it describes how objects and features in the environment provide opportunities for interaction.
Sources
Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
Caporael, Linnda R. 2014. “Evolution, Groups, and Scaffolded Minds.” In Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition, 1st ed., edited by James R. Griesemer, William C. Wimsatt, and Linnda R. Caporael. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. The MIT Press.
Dunbar, Robin I. M. 1998. “The Social Brain Hypothesis.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 6 (5): 178–90.
Dunbar, Robin I. M. 2024. “The Social Brain Hypothesis – Thirty Years On.” Annals of Human Biology 51 (1): 2359920.
You may think that the massive expansion of “friends” or “contacts” on social media changes this math, but studies of actual behavior online tend to reinforce the limit (Dunbar 2024).
Caporael clarifies that, except for dyads, these group sizes aren’t absolute but rather “basins of attraction for group sizes in a range roughly plus or minus a third…”
For someone working with artists, residencies, and community engagement, this resonates. We often assume bigger audiences, bigger boards, and bigger networks are always better, but some of the most transformative arts experiences happen in small groups where trust, conversation, and vulnerability can actually flourish.