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The Social Brain Hypothesis
Abstract
Conventional wisdom over the past 160 years in the cognitive and neurosciences has assumed that brains evolved to process factual information about the world. Most attention has therefore been focused on such features as pattern recognition, color vision, and speech perception. By extension, it was assumed that brains evolved to deal with essentially ecological problem-solving tasks. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
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Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“Language evolved to address a need for social communication and evolution may have forged a link between language and the social brain in humans (Adolphs, 2003; Dunbar, 1998; Kuhl, 2007; Pulvermuller, 2005).”
From Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition (2010) · cites this paper as Dunbar, 1998
In the citing paper
“In primates, greater cognitive challenges associated with forming bonded social groups in large societies, among other influences (DeCasien et al., 2017;González-Forero and Gardner, 2018;DeCasien and Higham, 2019), appear to have selected for increased brain size (Dunbar, 1998;Dunbar andShultz, 2007, 2017;Meguerditchian et al., 2021).”
From When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants (2021) · cites this paper as Dunbar, 1998
In the citing paper
“In contrast, the social brain hypothesis (SBH), originating from the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, proposes that the increase in brain size has been driven by the cognitive demands of primate's complex social life (Byrne & Whiten, 1988;Dunbar, 1998;Humphrey, 1976; see Whiten, 2018 for an historical account).”
From Baboons (Papio anubis) living in larger social groups have bigger brains. (2021) · cites this paper as Dunbar, 1998
In the citing paper
“One implication is that the ratio measures of relative brain structure size used commonly in comparative studies, such as neocortex ratio [8], ‘executive’ brain ratio [7,10,11] and ‘cerebrotype’ [50] conflate allometric scaling with selection on specific brain regions.”
From Embodied cognitive evolution and the cerebellum (2012) · cites this paper as [8]
Citations
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Research works printed but not linked: 15
- (1989) Sociality and competition in primates and non-primates. In (eds), Comparative Socioecolgoy, pp 223-242. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.
- Brothers, 1990, Concepts Neurosci, 1, 27
- Dunbar, 1989, J Zool London, 220, 167
- (1995) The Thinking Primate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- (1994) Primate brains and ecology: Looking beneath the surface. In (eds). Current Primatology, pp 1-12. Strasbourg: University of Strasbourg Press.
- (n.d.) Neocortex size determines group size in carnivores and insectivores. Ethology, in press.
- (1996) Fundamendtals of Human Neuropsychology. San Francisco: Freeman.
- Fletcher, 1996, Cognition, 00, 000
- Marino, 1997, Marine Mammal Sci, 14, 143
- (1989) Social systems as optimal strategy sets. In (eds), Comparative Socioecology, pp 141-149. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.
- (1994) What chimpanzees (might) know about the mind. IN (eds), Chimpanzee Cultures. pp 285-300. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- (n.d.) Theory of mind deficits and causal attributions. Br J Psychol. in press.
- (1981) We're All Kin: A Cultural Study of a Mountain Neighbourhood. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
- Gould, 1975, Contrib Primatol, 5, 244
- Jolly, 1969, Science, 163, 501
Metadata
- Authors
- Dunbar, R. I. M.
- Venue
- Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1998
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 178-190
- ISSN
- 1060-1538
- 1520-6505
- Language
- en
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Social Brain Hypothesis. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/(sici)1520-6505(1998)6:5
- The paper
- Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). The Social Brain Hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1520-6505(1998)6%3A5
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
