I'm sorry but this is the worst idea of this entire thread. Herding won't be fixed by this because, currently, all dinos are just dumb dummies that just wander around. True, they tend to go near the water and, therefore, most of them usually stick together because of that, but given enough time, more than just couple of them will eventually try to get away, going pretty far from the rest.
Now, some of us dream with big paddocks the way they were imagined for the original JP movie and in the novel, and that proximity thing you propose would make it impossible to keep them calm. In fact, I think it was programmed exactly as you propose sometime at the beginning, so some species like Brachios and Stegos where devillishly hard to contain. I still think maybe the stegos keep this way of counting social, but I don't really know.
No, I think it better that Frontier use whatever time they need now to create some wonderful AI to match the beautiful, realistic graphics they already came up with; an AI that includes proper herding (both with stampedes for cover and regroupings of armored herbivores to defend themselves), proper flocking (different from "herding" in that they should keep closer and move more or less into the same direction at all times), proper ambush and pack-hunting for carnivores, and territorial behaviour. If they add sleeping, new "socializing" for certain species (grooming, playing, matching displays) like ornithomimids and hadrosaurs instead of their current "tea parties", all the better to match those realistic graphics and really make it all inmersive.
If anything, social should count for herding and flocking dynamics in the following way: should a "herd" hosts less animals that the social limit, episodes of "panic" among its individuals should happen more frecuently, as they would tend to feel more vulnerable/defenceless, so triggering stampedes that can cause effects like some of them getting hurt; feeders, cars, fences or even vegetation like forests destroyed and instant death of some of them by stress alone, or even the killing of smaller animals the herd lives along with. And yes, that could be punishing if you're not ready to handle that like having enough hatcheries/ranger teams ready to tranq them. That's the point, and the fun, although this probably would requiere more ways to handle the animals, but that's another point.
