Cooperative social groups must balance growth benefits against interdependence costs at an optimal size

Evidence

The advantage of extending social interdependence and cooperation to an ever wider circle of conspecifics comes from the ability to exploit resources across an expanded territory and buffer the effects of temporary depletions or scarcities in any one local environment. But expansion comes at the cost of increased demands on obligatory sharing and regulation of reciprocal cooperation. Both the carrying capacity of physical resources and the capacity for distribution of resources, aid, and information inevitably constrain the potential size of cooperating social networks. Thus, effective social groups must be restricted to some optimal size—sufficiently large and inclusive enough to realize the advantages of extended cooperation, but sufficiently exclusive to avoid the disadvantages of spreading social interdependence too thin. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2506

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Dunbar’s number literatures and my knowledge of social capital theory — group size constrains cooperative reliability. — connects to: The association boom of 1960s-1990s was organizational growth without mass membership — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 151; A preponderance of small producers and buyers must effectuate enormously complex coordination — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1020
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on why anti-scale arguments fail or succeed: the optimal-size constraint applies as much to modern digital networks as to ancestral foraging bands.