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Why are conversations limited to about four people?

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Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#11

Post by paulddraper »

miketery wrote: post #8
stephengillie wrote: post #3

I'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.

You get 36 if you count the relationship in each direction (e.g. crush one way, disinterest the other way), and if you also count each person on their own (e.g. a quick temper).

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#14

Post by [deleted] »

paulddraper wrote: post #11
miketery wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a group of 6 will have 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15.

You get 36 if you count the relationship in each direction (e.g. crush one way, disinterest the other way), and if you also count each person on their own (e.g. a quick temper).

[deleted]

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#16

Post by wtvanhest »

siruncledrew wrote: post #9
stephengillie wrote: post #3

I'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.

Most humans can only really understand 2D (2 variables). That is why visual representation of data are almost always 2d. Graphs, charts, scatter plots.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#17

Post by rebuilder »

sp332 wrote: post #4

Because otherwise you have to wait too long for your turn to speak, and you start whispering to the person next to you.

To emphasize the point, you end up needing to listen to other people instead of having other people listen to you. This is a big problem with discussions, the need to show your own worth easily overrides the value in having an actual discussion.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#18

Post by api_or_ipa »

stephengillie wrote: post #3

I'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.

> 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.

Network effects grow surprisingly fast. Between 2 people there's only 1 bidirectional edge. Between 3 it's 3 and between 4 it's 6.

  | people | edges |
  |--------|-------|
  | 2      | 1     |
  | 3      | 3     |
  | 4      | 6     |
  | 5      | 10    |
Intuitively, this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message. In other words, each member must be cognisant of every other members response to every message. Between a few people that's manageable, but the combinatorics really grows for n >= 4.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#19

Post by mixmastamyk »

rebuilder wrote: post #17
sp332 wrote: post #4

Because otherwise you have to wait too long for your turn to speak, and you start whispering to the person next to you.

To emphasize the point, you end up needing to listen to other people instead of having other people listen to you. This is a big problem with discussions, the need to show your own worth easily overrides the value in having an actual discussion.

This is true, though not everyone is worth listening to, and not on $RANDOM subject.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#20

Post by ozzmotik »

alexpetralia wrote: post #12

This is really not rocket science - is a mathematical model required, and even reflective, of reality here?

id suggest that there is no inherent need for mathematical models at all, unless there was a specific desire in the first place to produce said models for some reason. while certainly one would hope that formal models and analysis is performed in the pursuit of some noble/practical end, sometimes it's just fun to research things for the sake of it, because there's always the possibility that in researching one concept, you get exposed to an expanding universe of other concepts that depend on that original one which you never would have considered without the context of the research being performed.

that being said, i think having a formalized way of speaking about the limits of social discourse could be highly beneficial in several different contexts, such as providing effective group therapy, the representation of social interaction in film/literature/etc, and beyond that it can also be used to reason better about the nature of that squishy device that evolved to the point of being able to even comprehend the idea of "conversations" in general, no less the concept of having multiple of them simultaneously

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