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The Architecture of Us: Social Group Scaling, Federation, and the Governance Structures Humans Already Know How to Build

A. C. Applebee, L. N. Combe · 2026

Abstract

Dunbar's number — the claim that humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships — has become received wisdom in organisational design, management theory, and popular science. This paper examines the statistical foundations of that claim and finds them wanting: Lindenfors et al. (2021) demonstrated that the neocortex-to-group-size regression produces a 95% confidence interval of 2 to 520, rendering the specific figure of 150 statistically meaningless. However, the observation that governance changes character at different scales is robustly supported across disciplines. Dunbar's layered model (5/15/50/150/500/1,500) finds empirical support from phone records, social media interaction data, and cross-cultural ethnographic evidence. We examine eight functioning examples of scaled community governance — Mondragon (80,000 workerowners), Rojava (4 million under democratic confederalism), the Zapatista autonomous zones (300,000 governed), Marinaleda (2,700 in cooperative economy), Swiss cantons (8.8 million in direct democracy), Hutterite colonies (500 years of communal living), kibbutzim, and Aboriginal Australian kinship systems (continent-wide trust networks without hierarchy).

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