Why We Are Still Social
The minimalist scenario is a fairly general model. Anthropologists who have studied hunter-gatherer groups suggest that there are “magic numbers” for group size, “magic” because they recur in anthropological and archaeological research (although, with less drama, we should probably call these numbers “basins of attraction” or “centers of gravity”). These group sizes also correspond to functional categories in hunter-gatherer groups: task groups (such as a group of foragers or hunters), residential bands (the men, women and children who resided more or less consistently in a community), and aggregations of bands, called “macrobands” (the seasonal gathering of bands who shared a common language, cosmology and ancestors). Quite independently, similar group sizes have also been observed in the functional organization of science (Hull, 1988).
We are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as individuals that it seems implausible that there should be consistency in group size that can be detected across time, from the Pleistocene to the present, and across cultures, from Kung Bushmen to American scientists. There are at least two reasons that make the idea more plausible. One is that the essence of sociality is the coordination of activity. The other is that the form of our bodies constrains coordination in specific ways.
Two friends tend automatically to fall into walking at the same gait. Five friends can march in step, but they typically clump, lag, string along and regroup. The synchrony in two people’s walking is a product of psychological mechanisms coordinating perception and action. It requires no thought, intention or practice. Sometimes this synchrony of movement maintains “twoness,” even when it is a problem. Imagine two strangers walking toward each other in a direct line. They dance and jerk trying to avoid bumping into each other until one or both manages to break the coordination. Consider another example: Five strangers in an elevator are simply an aggregate of five people, each lost in his or her own thoughts—what to have for dinner? who was that stranger on the phone? oh, I wish I were on my summer vacation… Should the elevator stop suddenly between floors, this aggregate of individuals is psychologically transformed into a working group. They are strangers still, but coordinating suggestions, explanations, observations and emotions—a product of shared fate and a problem to solve. What was an aggregate of people a moment ago is now a coordinated group ready to tackle a task.
Core Configurations
Dyads, composed of two people, and task groups, composed of about five to seven people, are examples of core configurations. For a group configuration (and there are many types of them) to be “core,” it must repeatedly assemble in human development, in daily life, and plausibly in evolutionary time, given available evidence. Like many other types of groups, core configurations are interdependent, face-to-face groups that enable different kinds of activity. In the above examples, dyads allow microcoordination between partners; task groups facilitate problem solving. In the anthropological literature, a band is composed of about thirty people and serves domestic functions—butchering, preparing food for storage, child-rearing. Although humans don’t live in bands in the modern world, we should still expect to see some traces in social cognitive processes and structure. The same goes for macrobands, which approximated the group size necessary to maintain genetic viability for humans. The seasonal gatherings of macrobands functioned for reproduction, competitive games and information about distant areas.
The relevance of tasks (from an evolutionary perspective) for a configuration is not the activity per se, but rather the set of social cognitive processes—afforded by the core configuration—that enable the activity. As is typical in evolutionary explanations, there is a “chicken and egg” character—neither core configurations nor their psychological correlates come first.
article author(s)
Linnda Caporael
Linnda R. Caporael, a former Fullbright-Hayes scholar, is a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy...more