Bobo vendors in Burkina Faso (via Wikimedia)
I happened to bump into a friend of mine today – Nick Booth of Podnosh. Smart man. Social media expert about town.
We were talking about this book, and he happened to mention that he’d been reading a fair bit about evolutionary psychology over the past year or so. As you do.
It turns out that there’s a fairly well-supported theory that human beings hit a psychological ceiling when it comes to building relationships. You can handle about 150 people, then things get too complicated. Early communities would hit that ceiling, and then splinter off into other villages and tribes.
It’s not that one more relationship provides the straw that breaks the camel’s back – it’s that each additional relationship multiplies the complexity of the network. One more node on the network adds thousands more possible interconnections, and our brains just don’t handle it. Or at least, they couldn’t.
