Unicycle #18 - Monkeysphere
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Hello dear friends, and happy Thanksgiving :-)
The Monkeysphere
You may have heard of Dunbar’s number. Robert Dunbar theorized that our brains can’t keep track of more than 150 or so stable relationships — relationships where you know roughly what the other person is about and how they relate to everyone else you know. The people in your group are your “monkeysphere”.
Why monkeysphere? The name comes from a story in this article. Pretend you have a pet monkey. Visualize your pet in detail — name it, dress it, take it to the park with you for a game of tag. When the monkey falls down the slide, you empathize with his pain. Now imagine you have five monkeys. Try naming and seeing them all in your mind. Now do it for a hundred monkeys. Starts to get exhausting, doesn’t it? You’re hitting the limit of your monkeysphere.
When someone’s in your monkeysphere, you see them as an individual. You care about them. And since your monkeysphere is limited, there’s only so many people you can actually care about. If a neighbor drop a $20 bill on the ground, we give it back to them. An extra box of paper towels from Amazon? We just keep it. Because Amazon is not in our monkeysphere, and we just don’t care (even if our neighbor works there and is indirectly affected).
I’m still chewing on this idea. It might be mundane and obvious to you, or it might help explain some of our social phenomena. Some implications:
stereotyping is a way to reduce a group of people to a single generic “relationship” so it fits into your mind
similarly, we think of “the government” or “the company” as people who have intentions and take actions, even though we know they are really just made of individuals.
loving-kindness meditation trains you to expand your empathy, or maybe to see each person directly so you can place them into your monkeysphere as you think of them.
western religion is a different strategy: bulid a relationship with God, place him firmly in your sphere, then see everyone as an extension of him
What do you think?
Song of the Week
Mashups were huge about a decade ago. Xaphoon’s one of the underrated greats.
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