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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?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

jplayer01 wrote: post #49
DoreenMichele wrote: post #36

We have the terms monologue and dialogue, but I'm not aware of words for 3 speakers or more specified by number. (They may exist, but presumably aren't in common usage.) So I'm a little surprised to learn that four-way conversations are a thing, actually. Or an important thing, I guess. Not that they exist per se, but that they are an important demarcation.

Four way conversations are only relevant as a concept in this case because of the effects on what would be considered a discussion at that number (or more) of participants.

[deleted]

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#52

Post by KineticLensman »

oldmancoyote wrote: post #2

An abstract is to summarize the results of research not to tease the reader. That's why I flagged it.

In some contexts the abstract has a bibliographic rather than reporting function. E.g 'is this paper relevant to my research', not what was the outcome of their research. I agree it is annoying when the abstract is only a tease to get you to look behind a paywall. However in defence and other contexts it is possible to have an unclassified abstract announcing but not summarising a piece of work whose results are classified.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#53

Post by PavlikPaja »

api_or_ipa wrote: post #18
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…

I guess this has something to do with why communication is so different in collectivist cultures. Maybe it's the different nature of communication itself that allowed collectivism by allowing to manage larger groups of people without getting into overwhelming numbers.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#54

Post by anonytrary »

a_t48 wrote: post #47
IncRnd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's directional. The calculation is 6x6 = 36. The simplest example is with two people. John is a different person from Mary, so both John and Mary have a relationship with each other. 1x2 = 2 relationships.

Shouldn't that be 6x5=30? Unless you count everyone's relationship with themselves.... [this also aligns with the 5+4+3+2+1 version, it's just n*(n-1)/2 ]

He probably meant to say 30, since he did set the diagonal elements to zero in his N = 2 answer (otherwise he would have said 4).

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#56

Post by Folcon »

hortonew wrote: post #44
bmm6o wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message Do they, though? Maybe I participate in conversations differently, but trying to unravel how A interpreted B's comment is not something I would do.

It's all I do. It's the only way I can understand if my next comment will offend or work as a joke or if I'm posing an interesting topic. It's what makes conversations so draining to an introvert I feel. The more people, the more I have to figure out what I can say to be ok with the group at hand.

That's fascinating, thinking about this, I've realised that I only do this when I'm in a conversation with new people or for whatever reason am specifically considering the interplay of what's being said.

Otherwise I have a broad set of heuristics I apply which I adjust as needed.

I never considered that a tendency to do this might have an impact on introversion/extroversion. Something to mull over, thanks!

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#57

Post by eksu »

PavlikPaja wrote: post #53
api_or_ipa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I guess this has something to do with why communication is so different in collectivist cultures. Maybe it's the different nature of communication itself that allowed collectivism by allowing to manage larger groups of people without getting into overwhelming numbers.

Care to elaborate on elaborate/enlighten on the difference nature of collectivist culture communication?

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#58

Post by eithed »

While yes, you have to get your turn to speak, there are sometimes situations where you don't need to speak to communicate. For example in my TS raid group while there are always speakers, I prefer to write on chat and can communicate even when somebody is speaking - while I can follow the conversation that is happening between 4 speakers I can partake in the discussion and can communicate with other verbal/nonverbal participants. While my points might get omitted in the discussion, or can have a delay to get picked up it allows people that didn't get their turn to speak to get into the "conversation". In that sense the problem is not communicating with 4 people - the problem is getting your turn.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#59

Post by PavlikPaja »

eksu wrote: post #57
PavlikPaja wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this has something to do with why communication is so different in collectivist cultures. Maybe it's the different nature of communication itself that allowed collectivism by allowing to manage larger groups of people without getting into overwhelming numbers.

Care to elaborate on elaborate/enlighten on the difference nature of collectivist culture communication?

There have been tons of research and nobody seems to fully understand it.

Collectivist, most messages are intended for the whole group, with ocassionally talking to a specific person, but it's expected the message will be understood by other people who are present. There is very little "code talking" within the group.

In individualist cultures, it's expected that most messages are targeted to specific people, and there can be whole dialogues meant to be only understood by the two people. Or a message may be superficially said to one person, but is actually meant to be overheard by another person. Very often what is said isn't actually true, but it was only said as a means to an end (to make somebody do or say something) and the people involved are expected to understand that. Very litle detail and deeper information is shared, things are rarely said that are not strictly necessary to know.

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