Why are conversations limited to about four people?
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Why are conversations limited to about four people?
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#2An abstract is to summarize the results of research not to tease the reader. That's why I flagged it.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#3I've always preferred groups of 2-6 people. Many board games are made for groups of this size.
On one side, humans can mentally cope with 4-6 objects at most - as though we have 4-6 memory slots, which is reasonable given that we have 4 limbs.
On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#4Because otherwise you have to wait too long for your turn to speak, and you start whispering to the person next to you.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#5An abstract is to summarize the results of research not to tease the reader. That's why I flagged it.
I also couldn't be bothered to read on after that.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#6More than 4-5 people simply gets impractical, but that's not such a big deal. With some restrictions you can have meetings with more people and e.g. at a long table it's simply a balance of distance (for voice and non verbal clues) and frustration of not being able to talk (at some point you just tell it your neighbor, splitting the group when it gets too big).
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#7for me it is an NP-hard-like reasoning. I'm not only concerned with my effect on the 3 other participants, i'm concerned with each participant's effect on each participant.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#8I've always preferred groups of 2-6 people. Many board games are made for groups of this size. On one side, humans can mentally cope with 4-6 objects at most - as though we have 4-6 memory slots, which is reasonable given that we have 4 limbs. On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.
a group of 6 will have 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#9I've always preferred groups of 2-6 people. Many board games are made for groups of this size. On one side, humans can mentally cope with 4-6 objects at most - as though we have 4-6 memory slots, which is reasonable given that we have 4 limbs. On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.
Tangential, but I noticed the same thing with visual information when testing data visualizations: people have a hard time processing information beyond 4-5 variables.
Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?
#10An abstract is to summarize the results of research not to tease the reader. That's why I flagged it.
Yeah, feels like the editors dropped the ball on that. Hopefully they'll fix it before the final version.
Anyway, here's a link: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.09.004