The social brain hypothesis and its implications for social evolution

By Robin I. M. Dunbar. Annals of Human Biology, 2009

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Reply to comments. Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis (2012, background): “…increases long before the Paleolithic may have created selection pressures related to maintaining group cohesion: since community size and complexity correlate with neocortex ratio in anthropoid primates (Dunbar 1993, 2009), group sizes can be estimated for early hominins (Aiello and Dunbar 1993).”
Machiavellian people’s success results from monitoring their partners (2012, background): “The computational capacity of primates is created by the demands of tracking social relationships and evaluating the costs and benefits of alternative social actions (Dunbar, 2009).”
NIRS-Based Hyperscanning Reveals Increased Interpersonal Coherence in Superior Frontal Cortex during Cooperation (2011, unknown): “The complexity and scale of our social interactions arguably distinguish us from other species and explain the development of the relatively larger neocortex in the human brain (Adolphs, 2003; Dunbar, 2009).”
The Interpersonal Dynamics of Emotion: Toward an Integrative Theory of Emotions as Social Information (2018, background): “According to the social brain hypothesis, humans and other primates evolved increasingly large brains to manage such complex social systems (Dunbar, 2009).”