Robin Dunbar

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Robin Dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar , RIM Dunbar for short (born June 28, 1947 in Liverpool ) is a British psychologist . He is currently Head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford . From 2007 to 2012 he was director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology in Oxford ; He was previously Professor of Anthropology at University College London from 1987 to 1994, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool from 1994 to 2007 .

He specialized in the behavior of primates and explained the origin of human language as communicative "scratching" in larger social groups.

He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1998 . He supports the British Humanist Association . For 2019, Dunbar was awarded the Human Roots Award .

Gossip and the Origin of Human Language

There are anatomical prerequisites for the human ability to speak, the social prerequisite was the need for communication in larger hordes of prehistoric humans, that is the thesis of Dunbar's main work Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language . Dunbar assumes that speech sounds initially had the same function as social grooming in smaller hordes: gossip is the glue that has kept society together for ages. It was only the development of language that made it possible to ensure social cohesion in larger groups, says Dunbar: "It allows us to interact with a number of individuals at the same time and to exchange information about the state of our social network." the question of what is "normal" and permitted and what is perhaps disreputable. When observations and opinions about the behavior of third parties are exchanged, social norms are negotiated. Language is only used to a small extent to provide information about things and facts; language is used to maintain community. Even today, according to Dunbar, more than 60 percent of people's daily conversations are “gossip”, that is, they deal with interpersonal concerns of real or supposed group members.

Dunbar number

In the early 1990s, Dunbar examined the relationship between the structure of the brain in mammals (especially the proportion of the neocortex in the cerebral cortex ) and the group size in which these mammals live. For humans, this would result in a maximum group size of 150 - the Dunbar's number . According to Dunbar, this is consistent with empirical observations on actual human communities.

The extent to which this rule is also valid for virtual social networks is currently being discussed .

Publications

  • with Patsy Dunbar: Social dynamics of Gelada Baboons. Karger, Basel [a. a.] 1975, ISBN 3-8055-2137-5
  • Reproductive Decisions: An Economic Analysis of Gelada Baboon Social Strategies. Princeton University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-691-08360-6
  • Primate Social Systems. Chapman Hall, London 1988, ISBN 0-412-53740-0
  • The World of Nature. Gallery Books, New York 1985, ISBN 0-8317-9619-7
    • Fascinating nature. A journey through the habitats of animals and plants on the seven continents. Bassermann, Niedernhausen 1989, ISBN 3-8094-0019-X
  • (Ed.): Human Reproductive Decisions. Macmillan, 1995, ISBN 0-333-62051-8
  • The Trouble With Science. Faber and Faber, 1995, ISBN 0-571-17448-5
  • Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-674-36334-5
  • with John Maynard Smith & WG Runciman (Eds.): Evolution of Social Behavior Patterns in Primates and Man. British Academy, 1997, ISBN 0-19-726164-7
  • The social brain hypothesis. In: Evolutionary Anthropology. 6, 1998, pp. 178–190 ( PDF )
  • with Chris Knight & Camilla Power (Eds.): The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8135-2730-9
  • with Guy Cowlishaw: Primate Conservation Biology. University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 0-226-11637-9
  • with Louise Barrett: Cousins: Our Primate Relatives. DK, London 2000, ISBN 0-7894-7155-8
  • with Louise Barrett & John Lycett: Human Evolutionary Psychology. Princeton University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-691-09622-8
  • with Russell A. Hill: Social network size in humans. In: Human Nature. Vol. 14, No. 1, 2003, pp. 53-72 ( PDF; 800 kB )
  • The human story. A New History of Mankind's Evolution. Faber and Faber, London 2004, ISBN 0-571-19133-9
  • with Louise Barrett & John Lycett: Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner's Guide. OneWorld, Oxford 2005, ISBN 1-85168-356-9
  • with Louise Barrett (Ed.): Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology. Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-19-856830-4
  • How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Harvard University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0674057166
  • with Tobias Kordsmeyer & Padraig MacCarron: Sizes of Permanent Campsite Communities Reflect Constraints on Natural Human Communities . In: Current Anthropology Vol. 58, 2017. ( Link )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ^ British Academy : Fellows Archive ( Memento of February 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive ).
  3. ^ British Humanist Association : Professor Robin Dunbar FBA ( Memento July 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Christina Nitzsche: Archaeological Research Center MONREPOS honors evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar with an international research award. Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (RGZM) - Leibniz Research Institute for Archeology, press release from July 31, 2019 at the Science Information Service (idw-online.de), accessed on July 31, 2019.
  5. ^ RIM Dunbar: Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 16 (4), 1993, pp. 681-735 ( draft version ) Accessed February 27, 2019
  6. ↑ Christian Stöcker: Communication - In the beginning there was gossip . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . July 28, 2004
  7. ↑ Marco Metzler: The Mechanisms of Virtual Relationship Networks . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . November 16, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Dunbar, Robin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald (full name); Dunbar, RIM
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 28, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool