This post was created in partnership with Viral Nation
While social media is constantly evolving, human nature hasn’t changed in millions of years.
During a Brandweek 2026 session co-hosted by Viral Nation, Nicholas Spiro, chief commercial officer at Viral Nation, explained how a deeper understanding of human instincts can guide marketers in how they connect, compete, and communicate on social media.
The evolution of human connection
Spiro opened the session with a bold statement: We are living in a time of historical paradox when it comes to human connection, and this paradox is most prominent on social media
“We are attempting to maintain more connections than any humans who have ever lived before us. At the same time, many of us report having never felt more alone,” he said.
Spiro recalled that his favorite college course was taught by a researcher of primate social intelligence and how that research relates to marketing. For instance, Spiro shared how primates can teach marketers about the adaptive and maladaptive relationship consumers have with social media.
Spiro described how someone’s Facebook wall fills up with birthday messages each year, often from people they haven’t spoken to in ages. He then tied this behavior back to research by Robin Dunbar, a leader in primate social psychology. Dunbar found that primates constantly touch and groom each other’s fur, and the ritual increased as the community grew.
“The larger the community, the more time spent in physical touch, and from that insight, he concluded that the primary purpose for this behavior was a social one, to build a connection, like a post on a Facebook wall,” Spiro explained
The research found that humans can maintain 150 stable connections, known as the Dunbar number.
“Fast forward to today, we are way past 150. We’re way past Dunbar,” Spiro shared. “The connections we are trying to maintain are immense, but the type of connections are very different. They take the form of likes, views, shares.”
The impact of envy and vulnerability
Spiro noted that the need to connect and be social is innate, but connection scales through one-to-one personal attention.
“A hundred thousand Facebook friends can’t do for us what the touch did for the primates in the troop,” he explained. “Even a brand needs to know its version of its Dunbar 150. Know and build your community intentionally, because personal attention is the one thing that will never scale.”
