Emotional Circle

Description

I personally define your Emotional Circle as the total number of people that you can have some type of non-mutual emotional connection with, most likely spread across numerous groups of all sorts. You "like" them in some way, but do not necessarily have to have strong ties to them.

In academia this threshold is called "social channel capacity". A study using two different methods to estimate, both suggest that it falls right around 290. However, I like to describe this number as "just short of 300." As I wrote in Dunbar Triage, many people confuse this number with the Dunbar Number (and in fact I have in some of my older pieces). However, like the Trust Circle, it's a distinct entity.

Emotional Circle size can vary quite a bit from individual to individual. Some people might have half the average capacity, and others considerably more — which is much more variation than you see among the sizes of smaller personal thresholds.

Some of those variations are individual, but some are societal. As I wrote in Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships, I believe that our modern era of television causes us to create para-social relationships with imaginary characters who we nonetheless become emotionally involved with, and thus might reduce our social channel capacity.

Is our Emotional Circle smaller today because of TV or is it higher because online communities can help to remind us of our emotional connections to other people? That's a topic that probably deserves more study.

An interesting point to make is that the people who are in your Emotional Circle, but are not in your Trust Circle, are your "weak ties" in social network terms. What is important about weak ties is that studies show (pdf) that opportunities and knowledge flow to you much more through weak ties than through the more insular strong ties of your trust circle. (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/11/personal-circle.html)