The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective

By Robin I. M. Dunbar. 2003

887 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental Biology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/717e15d8584b45e6661ef817200c32127638118d

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Citations in the corpus

Mind the gap; or why humans are not just great apes (2008, background): “There is some tentative comparative evidence (Dunbar 2003a, 2003b) given some additional support by recent as yet unpublished human neuroimaging studies—that intentional competences are correlated with some aspects of brain volume.”
Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, background): “…social relationships is transmitted with higher fidelity than equivalent non-social information (McGuigan and Cubillo 2013; Mesoudi et al. 2006; Reysen et al. 2011; Stubbersfield et al. 2014), as predicted by social brain theories of the biological evolution of primate cognition (Dunbar 2003).”
Evolution of the Size and Functional Areas of the Human Brain (2006, background): “…mean social group size, social clique size, frequency of reported acts of deceptive behavior, amount of social play (but not nonsocial types of play), and the degree to which male-dominance rank fails to accurately predict mating success (see review in Dunbar 2003, and references therein).”
Microfoundations for Strategy: A Goal-Framing Perspective on the Drivers of Value Creation (2013, background): “According to what become known as the “social brain hypothesis,” the most potent human brain power (the neocortex) evolved as a “social brain” to allow human beings to realize the adaptive advantages that stem from cooperation in larger groups involving joint production (Dunbar, 2003).”
Life History and Reproductive Strategies of Khao Yai Hylobates lar: Implications for Social Evolution in Apes (2008, positive): “…to develop during juvenile years (Cords and Aureli 2003; de Waal 1993; Joffe 1997), though gibbon societies with their negligible group size variation seem to lack the kind of social complexity predicted to trigger brain evolution (Aiello and Dunbar 1993; Dunbar 1992, 2003; Kudo and Dunbar 2001).”
Evidence from four lemur species that ringtailed lemur social cognition converges with that of haplorhine primates (2011, positive): “…species living in large, complex social groups because social skills allowing individuals to outcompete conspecifics for access to resources and mates will confer significant fitness advantages (Jolly 1966; Humphrey 1976; Byrne & Whiten 1988; Dunbar 2003; Seyfarth et al. 2005; Byrne & Bates 2007).”
The social brain hypothesis and its implications for social evolution (2009, background): “One such example is the gorilla, which has a relatively small neocortex and a large cerebellum: Correlating group with total brain size yields an anomalous result in the gorilla’s case, whereas correlating it with neocortex size results in a datapoint close to the regression line (Dunbar 2003b).”
Using the methods of experimental social psychology to study cultural evolution. (2007, background): “This is consistent with evolutionary hypotheses which argue that primate intelligence evolved to solve social problems (Byrne & Whiten, 1988; Dunbar, 2003; Whiten & Byrne, 1997), with one consequence of this 'Machiavellian intelligence' or 'social brain' hypothesis being that individuals should…”
Male dolphin alliances in Shark Bay: changing perspectives in a 30-year study (2015, background): “The ‘social brain’ hypothesis posits that the cognitive demands of negotiating social relationships that are numerous and complex drove the evolution of large brain size and intelligence (Alexander, 1979; Dunbar, 2003; Humphrey, 1976).”
Craniofacial Feminization, Social Tolerance, and the Origins of Behavioral Modernity (2014, background): “…Coolidge 2004, 2010), domain-general intelligence (Klein 1995), linguistic and symbolic capacities (Klein 2000, 2003; Mellars 1989b, 2007), abstract thinking (Lewis-Williams 2002), and increased flexibility in under- standing the minds of others as intentional (Dunbar 2003; Tomasello et al. 2005).”
Managing Joint Production Motivation: The Role of Goal Framing and Governance Mechanisms (2011, background): “These faculties created the adaptive advantages of human beings living in larger groups, and it seems that the most potent human brain power (the neocortex) evolved as a “social brain” to allow human beings to gain such adaptive advantages (Dunbar, 2003).”
Coevolution of Composite‐Tool Technology, Constructive Memory, and Language (2010, background): “Dunbar (1993, 2003) proposed that social grooming, which occupies a substantial amount of time, was replaced by vocal grooming of several individuals simultaneously when hominid group sizes exceeded a threshold that required allocating more than 30% of the time budget to one-on-one grooming.”
Social Relationships and Health: The Toxic Effects of Perceived Social Isolation. (2014, background): “…bond or social group in exchange for the possibility of long-term benefits; (g) recruiting support to sanction individuals who violate group norms; and (h) doing all this across time frames that stretch from a person’s distant past to multiple possible futures (Dunbar, 2003; Dunbar & Shultz, 2007).”
The relation between social rank, neophobia and individual learning in starlings (2006, neutral): “While social intelligence hypotheses have received a great deal of attention as explanations for interspecific differences in brain and cognition (e.g. Templeton et al. 1999; Reader & Laland 2002; Dunbar 2003), within-group relations between social rank and learning performance have received less sc”