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What is the Monkeysphere?

What is the Monkeysphere?
"There's that word again..." The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150. Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? I mean, they're not people. "So? Oh, not much. It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? They're all humans and they are all equally dead. Sort of.

The Tipping Point The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000. The three rules[edit] Malcolm Gladwell describes the "three rules of epidemics" (or the three "agents of change") in the tipping points of epidemics. The Law of the Few[edit] "The Law of the Few", or, as Malcolm Gladwell states, "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts".[3] According to Malcolm Gladwell, economists call this the "80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the 'work' will be done by 20 percent of the participants".[4] (see Pareto Principle) These people are described in the following ways: Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things /Illustrations by Adam Cole/NPR Editor's note on Feb. 14, 2018: Please scroll to the end of this story to see a corrections note. Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the subprime mortgage crisis. Over the past decade or so, news stories about unethical behavior have been a regular feature on TV, a long, discouraging parade of misdeeds marching across our screens. In general, when we think about bad behavior, we think about it being tied to character: Bad people do bad things. Which brings us to the story of Toby Groves. Chapter 1: The Promise Groves grew up on a farm in Ohio. "I can picture this," he recalls. Toby says his father simply thrust a newspaper at him. Toby's brother was almost 20 years older than Toby and worked at a local bank. Toby says he always had a difficult relationship with his brother. So it's against this emotional backdrop that what happens next occurs. Now for Toby, this was an easy promise to make. Which is what makes the addendum to this story all the more startling.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Amazon.de: Robin Dunbar: Englische Bücher 47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 things is going to be pretty random. So the fact that this first one is first doesn’t mean that’s it’s the most important.. just that it came to mind first. Dr.

Validation of Dunbar's Number in Twitter Conversations THE OPTIMAL SIZE OF A TERRORIST NETWORK Distributed, dynamic terrorist networks cannot scale like hierarchical networks. The same network design that makes them resiliant against attack puts absolute limits on their size. If so, what are those limits? A good starting point is to look at limits to group size within peaceful online communities on which we have extensive data -- terrorist networks are essentially geographically dispersed online communities. His analysis (replete with examples) shows that there is a gradual fall-off in effectiveness at 80 members, with an absolute fall-off at 150 members. Al Qaeda may have been able to grow much larger than this when it ran physical training camps in Afghanistan. This leads us to optimal group size, which according to Chris Allen's online group analysis, can be seen at two levels: both small and medium sized. This chasm (between 9-25 members) nicely matches the problem period in the development of terrorist and guerrilla networks that studies of guerrilla groups refer to.

The ‘Path’ to Social Network Serenity Is Lined With 50 Friends | Epicenter  Three ideas lurk behind Path, a new social service that launches Monday as an iPhone app. As CEO Dave Morin explains it, the first two are the products of scientific research. As a former Facebook exec — Morin was responsible for the Facebook platform that supported apps from outside developers — he was drawn to the work of evolutionary anthropologist R.I.M. Dunbar, whose work on the primate neocortex suggested that brain size limits the number of close connections. This applies to grooming cliques among apes and Internet social networks among humans. Is a ‘Favored Fifty’ the magic number for your Personal Network? This led Morin, who left Facebook early this year, to conclude that his new startup would put a limit on connections so that users would have “a quality network.” The second idea came from Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-winning economist who has studied the nature of memories, particularly their relationship to happiness. This leads to the third idea behind Path.

Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain If the size of your company grows past 150 people, it's time to get name badges. It's not that larger groups are somehow less secure, it's just that 150 is the cognitive limit to the number of people a human brain can maintain a coherent social relationship with. Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex -- the "thinking" part of the mammalian brain -- volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human "mean group size" of roughly 150. This number appears regularly in human society; it's the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Of course, badges aren't the only way to determine in-group/out-group status. Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. Tags: essays, psychology of security

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