Chapter Size and the "Dunbar Number"

The Limits of Friendship (in "The New Yorker")

BY MARIA KONNIKOVA

I saw this article in "The New Yorker" and it  got me thinking about chapter size and how 'effective' the college fraternity experience is. The Dunbar number? Generally speaking it is the number of people you call "friends". The article goes into it with more nuance, but lets call it 150 for now.

For years I have maintained (based only on anecdotal observation) that the minimum size of a good chapter is 50 men. Fewer that that and the chapter struggles to fill the operational positions for exec and the support areas.There is also difficulty managing finances (with the inevitable slow- and non-payers). and even fielding competitive intramural teams.

In reading this article I am led to consider whether there is an upward limit as well. Can you really have a full-on 'brotherhood' experience with more than 150 fellow chapter members? Perhaps there s a risk that a 150+ sized chapter will effectively split into multiple "sub-chapters" - groups who stick together and have independent agendas, even to the detriment of stated overall chapter goals and strategic vision. I know there are some 200+ member chapters. How do you keep it real?

Take a look at the article and share your experience and thoughts about it. Did you belong to a large "Sigma Phi Everyone" chapter, or a large chapter of another fraternity? How well did the experience work out. Was your chapter a smaller (100 or less) size? How effectively did you get to know all your brothers and did you work well together?

I'm not purposely leaving out sororities either. However, I suspect that there will be differences based on the presence or absence of a "Y" chromosome. I'd like to hear about it if only to show the contrast. Too many degrees of freedom and the examination gets unwieldy for this non-social scientist.

Lets hear your viewpoint. Comment either on the blog, Google+, or Facebook. I am hoping for some interesting discussion.

Social evolution: The ritual animal : Nature News & Comment

An interesting article about the uses and importance of ritual in building groups.While not specifically about college fraternities, many of the concepts are applicable to help understand why it is so damn difficult to eliminate hazing in chapters, and how gatherings like Edge, CLA, and Conclave, along with our 'private' ritual practices, are important in cementing fraternal ties.

Social evolution: The ritual animal : Nature News & Comment

[This article refers to...] a £3.2-million (US$5-million) investigation into ritual, community and conflict, which is funded until 2016 by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and headed by McQuinn's supervisor, Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse.

Rituals are a human universal — “the glue that holds social groups together”, explains Whitehouse, who leads the team of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, economists and archaeologists from 12 universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Rituals can vary enormously, from the recitation of prayers in church, to the sometimes violent and humiliating initiations of US college fraternity pledges, to the bleeding of a young man's penis with bamboo razors and pig incisors in purity rituals among the Ilahita Arapesh of New Guinea. But beneath that diversity, Whitehouse believes, rituals are always about building community — which arguably makes them central to understanding how civilization itself began.
[...]

Meanwhile, psychologist Ryan McKay at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Jonathan Lanman, a cognitive anthropologist at Queen's University, Belfast, are exploring how rituals can be broken down into their component parts and how each part influences behaviour. One such component is synchronized physical action [...] which social psychologists have shown promotes a sense of connection and trust between individuals.

This work builds on research by Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, who has shown that immersion in collective rituals, such as communal prayer, in Israeli kibbutzim increases cooperative behaviour in economic games — but only with other kibbutz members.