(Phys.org): A trio of researchers affiliated with the University of Oxford in England and Aalto University School of Science in Finland has conducted a study of human behavior and has found evidence backing up a prior theory that suggests humans have different layers that make up their social circle with different numbers of people in them. In their paper uploaded to the preprint server, arXiv, they describe their study which involved analyzing cell phone records to count calls, what they found and that they believe it means for us a group.
One of the researchers, Robin Dunbar, was part of a team that back in the 1990’s studied the correlation between brain size in primates and the number of individuals in their social groups. They found that the bigger the brain, the more members of their groups. More recently, he and colleagues have conducted some experiments that suggest that humans have layers or groups of contacts, with the closet layers having fewer people, and the farthest, more. Read more
