ERC Advanced Grant for social interactions project

Professor Robin Dunbar, of the University of Oxford in the UK, is using an ERC Advanced Grant to explore the processes that underpin social relationships to discover whether the mechanisms involved in social cohesion can be extended to modern urbanised societies.

Dunbar’s study will look at whether human social relationships have really changed that much since we were hunter-gathers 200,000 years ago, whether we are suited to living in a world where everyone is apparently supposed to know everyone else, and how we can achieve social cohesion at a time of great urbanisation and globalisation.

He said: “This is probably the single most difficult issue that we currently face. The world of living in small villages is, for the most part, gone. We have to deal with urbanisation, which is a recipe for social disengagement, and globalisation, where we lose our sense of being able to control things.”

By 2050, 80% of the world’s population will be living in cities.

One of the issues his ERC-funded project, entitled Psychology of Relationships, Networks and Community Cohesion, will examine is kinship. Dunbar intends to run neural activity tests to see if there is a sort of ‘shared interest’ short cut in the brain.