Sublime

Social capital is the productive potential of social networks to create value. It emerges from trust and the willingness to cooperate.

But sometimes you can also make an instant judgment about a stranger. Probably not for the loan of your life savings or the pin-number to your bank account, but certainly for a drink at the bar or a bit of help at the roadside. So how do we make that judgment?

the community divided into small clusters of honest people and it was the liars who provided the links between these cliques that maintained the community as an integrated whole.

Of the many emerging descriptions of our social brain, for me the simplest and most elegant is the highly regarded Social Baseline Theory of Lane Beckes and James A. Coan, two researchers at the University of Virginia.

There’s some controversy regarding the actual quantity of connections where Cognitive Scope Limitation kicks in (the Bernard-Killworth median, a competing estimate, is 231), but there’s little doubt that such a limit exists.

In addition to this there is a strong link between isolation and poverty: having two or more close friends reduces the likelihood of poverty by nearly 20 percent.