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Why are conversations limited to about four people?
- oldmancoyote 8y agoAn abstract is to summarize the results of research not to tease the reader. That's why I flagged it.
- anotheryou 8y agoI also couldn't be bothered to read on after that.
- jey 8y agoYeah, 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 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.09.004
- winningcontinue 8y agothanks. was wondering how could something upvoted this high be behind a paywall without anyone asking for the paper itself. It's like people read the abstract and choose to discuss what they will.
- KineticLensman 8y agoIn 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.
- stephengillie 8y agoI'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.
- miketery 8y agoa group of 6 will have 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 15.
- paulddraper 8y agoYou 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 8y ago[deleted]
- IncRnd 8y agoIt'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.
- a_t48 8y agoShouldn'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 ]
- anonytrary 8y agoHe 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).
- IncRnd 8y agoyes
- siruncledrew 8y agoTangential, but I noticed the same thing with visual information when testing data visualizations: people have a hard time processing information beyond 4-5 variables.
- sp332 8y agoBecause otherwise you have to wait too long for your turn to speak, and you start whispering to the person next to you.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rebuilder 8y agoTo 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.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoThis is true, though not everyone is worth listening to, and not on $RANDOM subject.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- travisjungroth 8y agoAnother way of looking at it is if people aren't listening to you, it's not a discussion. I was at a small party a week ago, and all 12 people in the room listened to me tell a story. None of them interrupted and felt the need to show their worth. But, I wouldn't call that a discussion.
- part997 8y agoMore than 4 people in a hunting party will scare any game. Small groups have evolution advantage.
- anotheryou 8y agoMore 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).
- elif 8y agofor 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.
- gnulinux 8y agoI agree with this. I also believe this is why socially normal (i.e. not socially awkward, not shy) people can have problem talking in crowds. Needs more cognitive overhead to analyze what words may cause what on certain people.
- munificent 8y agoThe article does mention the recursive nature of theory of mind like you note.
- alexpetralia 8y agoThis is really not rocket science - is a mathematical model required, and even reflective, of reality here?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ozzmotik 8y agoid 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
- logfromblammo 8y agoI always thought about this in terms of individual conversational coefficients. Each separate conversation consumes a total conversational coefficient of 1.0 from all sources. Go above 1.0, and some people don't get to have their say. Go below 1.0, and there may be uncomfortable lulls. Each person has a range of conversational contributions that they may feel comfortable with. A good university lecturer, radio show host, or stand-up comedian, for instance, might be able to sustain a maximum of 1.0 all alone for hours at a time. Someone with an inflated ego might not feel comfortable dipping below 0.5 for any length of time, whereas an introvert might range between 0.0 (pure listener) and a peak value they cannot sustain for long outside of a narrow range of topics. So establishing the most efficient number of conversations, and their participants, becomes a form of the backpack problem. A conversation group can only achieve its highest efficiency of some people aim to fulfill different roles. Some participants are bulky and heavy, some are spongy and flexible, and others are small and light. There's the baseline talker. This is likely the person with the highest sustainable coefficient. They drive the conversation. Then there are responders, who need to have a wide, tunable range of coefficient. They top off the conversation to 1.0 by adjusting their output to an appropriate value. There may be interjectors, who pipe up with a witty quip or relevant factoid every now and then, aiming for high return on low coefficient. There may also be swappers, who participate at a low level in multiple conversations, flipping to whichever one seems to have a lower coefficient, but less able to sustain higher coefficients than a responder. Sometimes there is even a gestural participant, who mainly contributes to the conversation with non-competing visuals rather than interruptable speech. So having a single conversation with more than six people is easy. You kick out the baseline talker, get two responders to drive the conversation instead, and fill up the rest of the group with interjectors. This happens all the time in tabletop gaming groups, where the game itself adds a baseline coefficient, and the typical participant has a low maximum sustainable coefficient. Some people just don't want to talk much, and the game can create a structured conversation that pulls lower-coefficient players up enough to make the group reach 1.0 .
- tylerjwilk00 8y agoThe problem I see with larger group discussion is that the idea permutates far enough from the original idea after 4 turns that a participant's response to the topic may no longer be valid in the new discussion context. It can be very frustrating to have to unwind the progress to an early point for the input to be valid.
- jschwartzi 8y agoThis is usually my experience, where if I'm with more than 3 people I stop talking because the idea I have is no longer relevant by the time there's an opening for me to say something.
- munificent 8y agoI got halfway through, which I think gets you to the answer to the money question of what's special about four. Here's my attempt to summarize: There are bunch of possible reasons conversation size might be limited or optimal at certain numbers. They choose to focus on mentalizing -- your ability to maintain a mental model of another person. (I don't know if they have a strong claim for why they chose this.) One interesting observation that HN will love is that mentalizing is recursive. When I have a mental model of your mind, that model includes why I think your mental model of me is, and so on. If I say something to Fred while George and Harry listen in, I can reason about what Fred will think of what I say, what George will think of what Fred will think of what I say, and what Harry will think of what George will think of what I will think of what Harry will think of... ad infinitum. By focusing on mentalizing, what matters more is the pairs of people in a conversation more than the number of people. It's about the relation between one person and their reaction to another. Pairs grow faster than linear as the number of participants increases. There are "n(n-1)/2" pairs in a conversation with "n" people. Then they make a distinction between "inclusive" and "exclusive" pairs. An inclusive pair is one that includes you. So in a three-person conversation, there are three pairs: you-A, you-B, A-B. So two of those pairs are inclusive. The number of pairs increases quadratically. The number of inclusive pairs increases linearly. At larger group sizes, most pairs of people don't include you. They claim four is the magic number because that's the largest conversation size before the exclusive pairs outnumber the inclusive ones. With four people, there are three inclusive and four exclusive pairs. With five people, there are four inclusive and six exclusive. It's a neat observation, but they note themselves that they are basically doing a post-hoc analysis. They started with four and then tried to find some math that makes it special, and eventually found two lines that cross at that point. I do think there might be something to it. If you assume that the most valuable interactions are ones that involve you (versus deriving value from seeing what two people say to each other), then it stands to reason that you want to avoid conversations where most utterances aren't from you or to you. But that also presumes (1) people don't derive much value from watching others talk to each other and (2) all participants are communicating to each other equally. Neither of those is true in practice. I think a smarter way to look at it is that people strive to maximize the total value they get from all pair-wise communications. One way to do that is in a small even-handed conversation. But you can also get that by: 1. Giving a speech where you get to do almost all of the utterances. So even though there are many many pairs, most of those channels are silent, and most of the communication does involve you. 2. Watching a debate where even though your aren't participating, you get a lot of value from what the other two are saying to each other. 3. Less formal approximations of the above. All of us have probably experienced a conversation that grew to larger than four people because a minority of them had more dominant personalities so you end up with a couple of "performers" and some "audience" though people occasionally change sides. Anyway, fun paper.
- buboard 8y agothat means webRTC can be quite useful
- amelius 8y agoNot on the internet ...
- DoreenMichele 8y agoWe 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.
- jplayer01 8y agoFour 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 8y ago[deleted]
- abraham_lincoln 8y ago6 ways from the Mythical Man Month, right?
- sjg007 8y agoHave you ever played the game telephone?
- anonytrary 8y agohttps://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/3509/products/buy_sell_1024x1024.jpg?v=1426516607 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/3509/products/buy_sel...
- carapace 8y agoThe dynamics of a good conversation are almost identical to those of a good game of hacky-sack.
- eithed 8y agoWhile 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.
- linkmotif 8y agoThe Discord engineering blog post this week has a fascinating sentence on this topic, perhaps much more interesting to me than the engineering itself: > Every audio/video communication in Discord is multiparty. Supporting large group channels (we have seen 1000 people taking turns speaking) https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half...
- vignesh_m 8y agoBehind a paywall :/
- platz 8y ago> we present one novel possible explanation for the four-person conversation size constraint. But we're not going to tell you in the abstract.
- dragontamer 8y agoThere's a reason why Roberts Rules, and other parliamentary procedures exist. Once you get to ~10 people who all want to input something into the discussion, its completely and utterly impossible to move a discussion forward without a set of rules. Normally, one person who yells the loudest and ignores the most people eats up the entirety of conversation space. As such, basic rules are invented. In Roberts Rules, its one-at-a-time, and at most contribute 2-times per any particular subject, at roughly 10-minutes maximum per person. The "Chairperson" controls the discussion to ensure the rules are applied equally to everyone, so that everyone gets a turn. If possible, the Chairperson is supposed to choose an order of people's speaking turns so that both sides of a discussion alternate back and forth (pros, then cons, then pros again. Etc. etc.). Its slower, but it scales better. The unfortunate effect is that most people don't understand the point of Roberts Rules or Parliamentary procedure (there are many sets of rules, Roberts Rules are just the most common in the USA), so most people just see it as unnecessary set of rules that slow down a conversation.
- woodandsteel 8y agoWhen I have a conversation, I like it to be back-and-forth: I say something, they react, I react to that, and so on, with reactions being things like asking a question, making an evaluation, saying I have had something similar happen to me, making a funny comment, and so on, so we go further and maybe deeper, a process I find rewarding. The more people, the less often I get to react, and so it gets less enjoyable. On the other hand, with some groups we are on the same wavelength enough that a third person's reactions to the second person are enjoyable to me, too, so I am happy to just listen to their back-and-forth, at least for a while. Ditto if it is a subject being discussed that is really interesting.