Recently I went to a gathering where thousands of people could sit. It looked like a small stadium. There were huge microphones so that the speakers’ words could be heard. One speaker after another kept delivering uninterrupted lectures. Sitting somewhere in the last rows, I could not understand a single word of what they were speaking. Not that I didn’t understand — but perhaps because of the echo in the hall, not a single word was audible. It felt as if neither the organisers nor the speakers cared about this echoing.
Not just in the last rows — even if we looked further ahead, it did not seem like any of the viewers had any real interest in the lectures. Each person was busy with their own cellphone. Some others were chatting and laughing with the people next to them. Observing carefully, it appeared as though the speakers, the viewers, and the organisers — everyone was doing their own thing… yet the meeting was still going on. It kept going on like an unavoidable ritual. As soon as one speaker finished, some people habitually clapped and then sank back into their own activities. Another speaker came and the same pattern continued. This whole affair went on for nearly three hours. In the midst of thousands of people, without any transmission of feeling, without any exchange of thought, a purposeless, lifeless ritual went on like a custom.
Have we turned into groups that lack collective feeling? Or, when viewers gather into a large group, do they lose all interest in emotional transmission? Or are there certain cognitive limitations within human collective feeling? This thought began in me. I felt like subjecting this thought to a speculative test.
Why is it that as the number of people in the gathering increases, the behaviour of the speaker changes — the speech turns into shouting, provocative statements increase, excitement rises, they shout slogans, utter insulting remarks? For example, we see film actors forgetting their age and the maturity that should come with age, bursting out with vulgar jokes about women, cracking pointless jokes just to elicit laughter from the audience. Why do viewers lose their individuality and sway in collective emotion? Are all these happening just like that, or are there evolutionary reasons behind them?
In both delivering speeches before large crowds and in crowds listening to a single speaker — in this “mass communication” business — humans have cognitive limits, says British evolutionary and humanist scientist Robin Dunbar. He named the number of people with whom an individual can maintain meaningful communication the Dunbar Number. Robin Dunbar researched how primate species live in groups. Some primates have groups with 10–15 members, while animals like baboons have 50–100 members, rarely more. When is a group possible? Only when those animals have certain abilities: the ability to recognise faces of fellow animals, to have empathy for their emotions, and to maintain long-term stable relationships.
Depending on the size of their brains, these abilities develop. Primates with less-developed brains have smaller groups; those with more-developed brains have larger groups. When this idea is extended to humans, studies revealed that because humans have a highly developed neocortex, each person can be part of a group of about 150 members. This is what he called the Dunbar Number. This number not only indicates the cognitive limit a person can achieve but symbolically shows the limit of empathy, attention toward others, and the ability to converse meaningfully with others. Do humans really have the capacity to communicate beyond 150 members? Does a group exceeding this size lose its natural biological coherence?
Since ancient times, humans lived in small tribes. Living in groups is a tribal trait. Because the tribe had few members, a dialogue space was naturally available to discuss matters and make decisions. The reason that many ancient human republican systems were democratic is precisely the fact that humans lived in small groups. The Greek and Roman republics, Indian ganas and janapadas — their democratic nature perhaps had something to do with the Dunbar Number. Had our ancestors lacked at least some amount of rationality and democratic spirit, we would not have come this far in human social evolution.
But in the modern world, the nature of relationships among humans and the nature of communication systems have undergone extreme change. Mass gatherings, election campaigns, religious sermons, film star promotional events — everywhere the idea prevails that the more people attend, the greater the success. When humans are placed in an environment that crosses their Dunbar cognitive limit, human behaviour acquires unnatural features. When speakers see thousands of people, they lose direct face-to-face connection. All the audience becomes like heaps of emotional abstraction.
As stress hormones and dopamine increase, the natural inhibitions that should keep speakers composed disappear, and they begin to speak whatever comes to their mouth, behaving however they please. The audience, having crossed the Dunbar limit, also turns into blind sheep who nod along to the speaker’s aggressive, provocative speech. When the dialogue space that can exist between individuals disappears, individuality becomes de-individuated (Gustave Le Bon’s crowd psychology). It dissolves into the tsunami of euphoric dopamine surge. The speaker’s excitations and the audience’s agitations act as mirror effects to each other. But here another question arises.
Broadly, in gatherings of thousands, two tendencies appear clearly. One is the silent, ritualistic meeting like the one I attended — where group character is lost and only the noise of the meeting remains, a sort of cognitive numbness. The second is the meeting where the entire crowd turns into a single amorphous mass like a herd — a form of cognitive dissonance. On one side stands the vast, unquestioning public; on the other, the mob created by personality cults. These two may appear different, but politically both manifest as the rise of the “ideal voter” desired by political leaders.
Cognitive numbness produces a society of empty noises (emotional withdrawal). The mind sees social injustices but never participates. This is not ignorance — but lack of responsibility, lack of response. Cognitive dissonance creates a society of frenzied slogans (emotional overflow). Political rallies, film star meetings, marches — these become theatrical performances instead of real discussions. Meaning: when we cross the Dunbar boundary, we fall either into numbness or madness. Speech swallows conversation. The citizen is transformed into a nodding sheep. This is contrary to the spirit of democracy.
Democracy is not merely a political ideology. It is a natural state that human cognition must reach. It depends on conversation, empathy, accountability, and the rationality cultivated in small groups. Where only a few people could gather — like the Athenian assembly, the Greek tribal councils, village panchayats, town assemblies — democracy worked successfully. It does not succeed in large numbers. Both Socrates and Plato feared that democracy would inevitably degenerate into mob rule. We also observe that democracy can quietly become numbocracy — a system that silently accepts bureaucracy and technocracy. The printing press, television, the internet, and now social media like
Facebook and Instagram — these transform human society into a digital crowd. Instead of facilitating democracy, they alter the cognitive environment itself, increasing sloganeering consciousness and polarisation. At such a time, we must ask whether the gradual shift from the importance of the individual to herd morality — instinctual degradation — is what today's democracy has become.
The Dunbar Number is not just a scientific explanation for these global conditions. It is a warning. When humans expand beyond their natural cognitive limits — as groups, as intellectuals, as citizens, as fans, or as followers — democracy loses its dialogic character. Hence, this is the time to transform the loud voices of big stages into conversations of small groups. But 150 is not a fixed number. It should be taken symbolically for smaller groups. This is the most crucial idea in my speculative thought experiment. There is no rule that it must be exactly 150.
But unless we recognise that meaningful communication has a cognitive limit, we lose the chance to understand how small-group experience and human cognition are intertwined with democratic thought. At the same time, we need not romanticise small groups. Nor should we allow this argument to drift into determinism — the biologisation of politics — that says democracy has no flaw but the human brain itself is flawed.
Instead, we must recognise the role of small democratic groups. And we should also consider the possibility that small groups can work as a network. Only democracies built on firm, rule-based systems — free from personality cults and herd tendencies — can allow large societies to survive. For a big democratic nation to function effectively, independent legal and legislative institutions must be strengthened. Growing technology should help turn individuals into deliberative groups, not echo chambers. To revive our democracy, it must be rebuilt within the range of human cognition — not artificially, but naturally; not with hatred, but with empathy.
If human evolution is not yet complete, democracy too is not complete. Similarly, if democracy is failing to stand firm, human cognitive evolution too has not yet reached completion. Whenever democracy moves away from its empathy limits and meaningful dialogue, it is reduced to nothing but a slogan-like noise.
Dr. Virinchi Virivinti
Image by Srujan Raj
