I don’t think that Dunbar’s number has a direct relationship with that. Dunbar’s number is about the amount of people you can have a relationship with, but you don’t need a relationship to have an emotional inclination to be kind towards another person.
Thank you for catching that! I will fix the post once I have the time. Still, even if Dunbar’s number does not directly define the limits of human empathy, it does limit the amount of people you can really conceptualize or understand in an intuitive manner; anything beyond that has to be abstraction. (That is, it limits the amount of people who you can really feel sonder for, even though we all know abstractly that all eight billion of us have inner lives as valuable as our own.) You cannot feel empathy towards something that is not a person (to empathize with inanimate objects or animals, you need to humanize/anthropomorphize them), and since Dunbar’s number limits the amount of people you can conceptualize, it limits empathy.
I don’t think that Dunbar’s number has a direct relationship with that. Dunbar’s number is about the amount of people you can have a relationship with, but you don’t need a relationship to have an emotional inclination to be kind towards another person.
Thank you for catching that! I will fix the post once I have the time. Still, even if Dunbar’s number does not directly define the limits of human empathy, it does limit the amount of people you can really conceptualize or understand in an intuitive manner; anything beyond that has to be abstraction. (That is, it limits the amount of people who you can really feel sonder for, even though we all know abstractly that all eight billion of us have inner lives as valuable as our own.) You cannot feel empathy towards something that is not a person (to empathize with inanimate objects or animals, you need to humanize/anthropomorphize them), and since Dunbar’s number limits the amount of people you can conceptualize, it limits empathy.