CS Forum: Robin Dunbar
Title: Why Facebook Wont Get You Any More Friends: Cognitive and Time Constraints on Social Relationships
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Place: Odeion, TUAS-Building, Otaniementie 17, Espoo
Aalto University conferred the title of Honorary Doctor on Professor Robin Dunbar from the University of Oxford at the Ceremonial Conferment of Doctoral Degrees on 12 October 2012. He is a highly-esteemed scholar of social interaction, social brain mechanisms, cognitive and social anthropology and social networks, who obtained his doctorate at the University of Bristol in 1973. He is now a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science.
Abstract: Social Networking sites like Facebook promised that they would allow us to have a much wider circle of friends than was possible in the everday face-to-face world. But has that turned out to be true? I examine data on the size and structure of online egocentric social networks and show that the number of online friends is not larger than the number of offline friends. I will then ask why this has to be so. In doing so, I will examine the psychological and other mechanisms that underpin friendships, adn suggets that, at least so far, the digital world has not really risen to the challenge set by our biology.
A short bio:
Robin Dunbar is a Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. His principal research interests focus on the evolution of sociality (with particular reference to primates and humans). He is best known for the social brain hypothesis, the gosspig theory of language evolution and Dunbar's Number (the limit on the number of the social relationships we can manage). His popular science books include "Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language", "The Human Story", "How Many Friends Does One Person Need", "Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks" and "The Science of Love and Betrayal".